Confraternities and Public Display in Messina: from Antonello da Messina to the Arciconfraternita degli Azzurri and Arciconfraternita dei Rossi

The present essay aims to examine a particular form of socio-corporative entity, the confraternity, that emerged in Messina, as in the rest of Europe, between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Apart from a few specialized studies, the confraternal phenomenon in Messina and, more generally, in Sicily lacks broad and in-depth academic attention, having been mostly the subject of popular publications. This is partially due to the dispersion and fragmentation of the documentation, whose analysis would require an interdisciplinary team that included historians, anthropologists, and art historians. This essay is not an exhaustive study of the city’s confraternities but an overview how these important lay organizations struggled to display their identity and status in the contested urban space of Messina (map 14.1).