170 FROM THE ART OF BUILDING TO THE ART OF THINKINGsometimes categorized with the inferior arts and sometimes with the
higher ones.^3
Thus in Florence there were twenty-one corporations divided into
seven higher arts and fourteen lower arts. The first included judges and
notaries, silk and wool merchants, bankers, doctors, apothecaries, and
silk and wool manufacturers. The lower arts included butchers, cob-
blers, smiths, salt merchants or regrattiers, oil sellers, wine merchants,
innkeepers, masons and stone carvers, locksmiths, breastplate mer-
chants, leather merchants, wood sellers, bakers, and stocking makers.
Each of these arts had its own meetinghouse and elected syndics
and consuls who held places of honor in official ceremonies. Each art
also had its own color and its own banner or standard, which was car-
ried at the front of processions.
The standard bearer of the Republic was chosen from among citi-
zens belonging to the higher arts, while those who were inscribed in the
lower arts furnished one fourth of the city's magistrates.
There are numerous traces of the builder mastery associations from
the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries. For instance,
we find them mentioned in town and city statutes, such as the masons
(cementari) of Milan, the magistri murorum of Parma and Plaisance,4
the muratores of Modena, and the magistri lapidum and lignaminis of
Florence and Lucca. The Italian mastery associations took on the form
of brotherhoods, which is to say they pursued both religious and char-
itable goals with the same intensity that characterized their pursuits of
a more professional nature.
Among the oldest statutes of Italian builders' mastery associations
are those of the Venice stone carvers, dating from 1317 and renewed in
- These statutes open with a prayer to the Very Holy Trinity and
continue on to express a keen desire to contribute "to the glory of God
and the glorious Virgin Mother Mary, who is our constant advocate.
There is also evidence of the worship of the Four Holy Crowned
Martyrs, protectors of the mastery associations.^5 This is quite possibly
the earliest mention by builders of the individual worship of the Four
Crowned Martyrs, a patronage mentioned in England at the end of the
fourteenth century or the beginning of the fifteenth century and in the
statutes of the German stonecutters from the sixteenth century. There