The Arte di Calimala, the guild of the cloth finishers and merchants in foreign cloth, was one of the greater guilds of Florence, the Arti Maggiori, who arrogated to themselves the civic power of the Republic of Florence during the Late Middle Ages.[1] The ascendancy of the Calimala ran from the organization of Florentine guilds, each with its gonfaloniere in the thirteenth century, until the rise of the Medici usurped all other communal powers in the fifteenth century. Their presence is commemorated in the via di Calimala, leading away from the city's Roman forum (now Piazza della Republica) through the Mercato Nuovo to the former city gate, the Por Santa Maria, as the Roman cardo; the main street, as old as Florence itself, was a prime location for trade, even though, unpaved, crowded, and much narrower than its present state, it was truly a callis malis,[2] an "ill passage-way". The name Calimala is of great antiquity and obscure etymology. Though the original earliest archives of the Arte di Calimala were lost in an 18th-century fire,[3] abundant copies, preserved at the Archivio di Stato, Florence, document the guild's statutes and its activities.[4]
- ^ The first archival study was G. Filippi, L'arte dei mercanti di Calimala in Firenze ed il sua piu antico statute, (Turin: Fratelli Bocca) 1889; a recent study is A. Doren, (G.B. Klein, tr.) Le arte fiorentini, 1940; the first study in English was Edgcumbe Staley, The Guilds of Florence, 1906; a recent overview in English of the broad social context of the Florentine textiles and related industries is Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing, Part I "Guilds and Labor", 2002.
- ^ "Calismala" is written at the head of an early set of statutes, according to E. Dixon, "The Florentine Wool Trades in the Middle Ages: A Bibliographical Note", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, New Series, 12, (1898):151-179) p 151 note 1.
- ^ Amy R. Bloch, "Lorenzo Ghiberti, the Arte di Calimala and fifteenth-century Florentine corporate patronage", in Daniel Ethan Bornstein and David Spencer Peterson, eds., Florence and beyond: culture, society and politics in Renaissance Italy: essays in honour of John M. Najemy 2008:143; Margaret Haines and Francesco Calioti, "Documenting the Gates of Paradise" in Gary M. Radke, Andrew Butterfield, The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance masterpiece, 2007:80-98, esp. 85 note 4.
- ^ Copies of the lost early archives made by Carlo Strozzi (1587-1670) a 17th-century scholar, are in the Spoglie Strozziani in the Archivio di Stato.