‘De una medesima patria et prattici insieme’ : nationality and friendship in the Neapolitan marble industry at the end of the sixteenth century

On the early modern Italian peninsula, familial and social relationships were not severed by relocation from one city to another. That is why there were many lasting ties in the community of Florentine marble-workers in Naples in the late sixteenth century. Michelangelo Naccherino, Pietro Bernini and Giovanni Antonio Dosio, but also Iacopo Lazzari, Dionisio Nencioni and Clemente Ciottoli – sculptors and marmorari – formed bonds not only through working together and sharing commissions but also by choosing their fellows to act as best men at their weddings and living in the same neighbourhood. Such a community of marble-workers has not yet been the object of a thorough or comprehensive study, aimed at uncovering the web of familial ties underpinning groups of artists. Neapolitan archives store not only payment records that reveal more than just the artwork paid for, but also exceptional documents known as processetti matrimoniali, drafted before a marriage and aimed at collecting testimonies about the groom from his ‘friends’. Such documents provide unexpected insights into how workshops functioned, how the marble-workers married relatives of their co-workers, and how endogamy, well known to have existed among the Florentine merchant classes abroad, also characterized a lower social class, that of the artisti.