On the Separation of the Arts in Venice: A Neglected Passage from the Statutes of the Stonemasons’ Guild

Abstract

Artists in earlymodernVenice rarelyworkedwithmore than onemedium. As inmost major European cities, Venetian craftsmen belonged to guilds, known locally as the arti or fraglie (and conflated with their confraternity, the scuola). Since the Middle Ages, the arti were divided in broad terms according to the primary material they employed: wood sculptors belonged to the arte of the marangoni da case (house carpenters), painters to the depentori, stonecutters and sculptors to the tagiapiera. Differentiation according to technical process (such as that between woodcarving