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CHAPTER 3

Appearance

It is often said that “clothes make the man,” and appearance is indeed the most obvious signal of identity.¹ Before names are exchanged and languages employed in spoken discourse, impressions have already been formed on the basis of appearance.² Instinctively, and not always correctly, we interpret such cues as physiognomy, dress, and jewelry in order to categorize and judge others according to gender, status, and even religious or cultural or ethnic affiliation. The elements of appearance thus communicate social identities in a nonverbal manner.³ Yet because the meanings and relative importance of the components of appearance vary according to context, messages sent by the wearer of a certain costume may not be perceived, or even received, by his or her viewers. The people we meet have likely conferred upon us a social identity based entirely on appearance without our even being aware of it.

How can we apprehend the appearance of medieval Salentine men, women, and children who belonged to a range of social, religious, and cultural groups? First, we can examine both skeletal remains and artifacts retrieved from tombs. Physical remains tell us something about the size and health of these people, and grave goods provide evidence for contemporary dress and ornament. Second, painted representations of individuals, often called “donor portraits,”⁴ are especially valuable; even if they do not report what the supplicant really looked like or what he or she actually wore, the depictions are at least related to patrons’ and viewers’ aspirations and expectations about appearance. Third, certain realistic details in the religious imagery so prominent in South Italian medieval art may also reveal contemporary practices in clothing, hairstyle, and adornment; convincing work has been done on the interpretation of such “realia” in Byzantine religious art.⁵ Finally, textual sources sometimes convey information about the ways in which the various elements of appearance communicated meaning in their own time. In this chapter, I analyze archaeological, artistic, and textual sources to uncover the most significant components of appearance: physiognomy, dress, jewelry, and hairstyle.

Physiognomy

Skeletal material from medieval southern Italy is limited but still informative about stature and diseases that might affect appearance. Tenth- and eleventh-century skeletal remains from the medieval village of Quattro Macine provided a male adult specimen approximately 1.672 meters (5.48 feet) tall and a female 1.515 meters (4.97 feet) tall (from tomb XI, [102]).⁶ Here and at the nearby excavated medieval village of Apigliano, the deceased are aptly described as “smallish” in stature.⁷ Many individuals suffered from joint ailments, particularly osteoarthritis,⁸ and even children were susceptible to the dental decay that caused adults to lose most of their teeth before death.⁹ Three infant burials at Quattro Macine show a malformation of the growing ends of the long bones, a visible genetic defect.¹⁰ The curved femurs of an early medieval male buried at San Pietro Mandurino may indicate an equestrian profession,¹¹ though they would seldom be visible under his clothing.

To a limited degree, biological characteristics helped constitute individual and group identities.¹² This is particularly clear in the case of slaves. Even though the most detailed information about slavery in medieval Italy comes from northern cities, there is no doubt that slavery was a part of southern Italian urban life as well. There are records of purchases and manumissions in twelfth-century Bari and thirteenth-century Lucera;¹³ in the Salento, a slave in Gallipoli was donated, along with his sons and property, to the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria at Nardò in 1115.¹⁴ However, prior to the early thirteenth century skin color is rarely used as a descriptive adjective for slaves.¹⁵ A female slave purchased by a Jewish resident of Taranto in 1482 is identified as having black skin, but also, and equally, she is said to be unbaptized, of good health, and named Catherine.¹⁶ Assigning color was, in any case, a highly subjective process: “Tartar” slaves brought to Florence from the north shore of the Black Sea might be described as black, brown, olive, fair, reddish, or white.¹⁷ Faces were far more important than color, as they were believed to communicate aspects of character and elements of distinctive individuality that would be most useful in identifying a slave who ran away.¹⁸ Hence eye shapes and colors were often noted in slave transactions, as were body piercings (mostly ears, though one Greek female had a pierced nose), whereas such mutable traits as hair color and hairstyle were omitted. Unlike skin color, nose shape could serve as a proxy for ethnic labeling: Tartars all had flat, snub noses even though they came in six colors.¹⁹ An ancient Jewish midrashic compilation says there can be no legal identification of a man without identification of his nose, the most important feature of his face.²⁰ It is worth noting that all the religious groups in the Salento believed that things seen by a woman during her pregnancy would affect the appearance of her child.²¹

If we turn to images of human supplicants to assess the physiological and immutable features of appearance—stature, skin color, facial features—we find some correspondence with the archaeological record. When the painted figures are paired, presumably husband and wife, the male is shown noticeably taller, which accords with the skeletal evidence. Two examples are the parents, Antony and Doulitzia, in the apse at Vaste [157.A], and the anonymous embracing couple on the ceiling at Li Monaci [Plate 9]. The size disparity is even greater at the Candelora crypt in Massafra, where a kneeling male figure adjacent to Mary in the scene of Jesus going to school is the same height as the standing female behind him [63.A; Plate 12]. Almost all depicted supplicants are very small compared to the holy figures they venerate—Santa Maria del Casale near Brindisi [Plate 5] contains notable exceptions—but this is clearly symbolic.

Depictions of nonwhite skin are limited to nonhumans: the devilish personifications of the Jordan River in scenes of Christ’s baptism at Otranto and San Mauro near Gallipoli are black, as is the enormous stucco-relief Satan in the Last Judgment at Soleto [113.B] and the tiny demons there and in the same scene at Santa Maria del Casale [28.A]. The angels who guard the access to Paradise in Soleto are red. No depicted supplicant or servant is black or brown, but what I am calling “white” might well have been termed “olive” or “reddish” or “fair” by medieval viewers (and slave owners). Different kinds of noses are shown, sometimes in the same monument, but it seems very unlikely that a snub nose, like that found on many of the painted figures at San Vito dei Normanni [109], is anything other than an artist’s unconscious stylistic fingerprint.

Clothing

More than stature, skin color, and even facial features, clothing was critical to the construction and perception of individual and group identities in the Middle Ages. Yet the homogeneity of depicted fashions at any given date—regardless of the language of accompanying inscriptions or material evidence for local worship or textual information about the local community—indicates that clothing alone is not an adequate indicator of cultural identity. It could reveal or conceal the wearer’s gender, age, profession, wealth, and other aspects of status through the selection of colors, fabrics, specific garments, and trims. Only at the very end of our period did clothing reliably reveal the wearer’s faith: even though badges were imposed on Jews after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, we do not see them in local artwork until more than two centuries later. While no aspect of dress is remote from the issue of status, in this section I examine clothing from the perspectives of fabrics, colors, garments, and styles, showing how depictions of dress can serve, in conjunction with other features, as indicators of date. Only after compiling these “factual” data about medieval garments can we discuss what they reveal about social class.

Fabrics and Colors

The information gleaned from a close look at painted clothing has been almost entirely ignored in the local literature; the sole exception is that archaeologists regularly compare excavated metal belt fittings and earrings with the same objects worn by a well-preserved painted Saint Lucy at the Buona Nuova crypt at Massafra [62].²² A recent study of the nomenclature of material culture in Apulia relies almost exclusively on notarial acts and rarely ventures into the artistic evidence for the terms being defined; the same limitation applies to a classic older study of Byzantine clothing in Greece.²³ Yet it is worth combining the textual, archaeological, and artistic data in a more nuanced manner to assess which features in the painted corpus are observed, contemporary realia and which are the products of model books or the artist’s imagination.

No cloth has survived in Salentine tombs, where even leather has decomposed in the damp climate, but archaeologists have identified spindle hooks and whorls at the medieval village of Quattro Macine.²⁴ The presence of more sheep bones than goat remains at Otranto suggests that the former were preferred, doubtless for their wool,²⁵ though rough goatskin garments are not unknown in the Byzantine world.²⁶ Sheep remains have been found at every medieval excavation, even prior to the tenth century.²⁷ Wool and linen were the most common fabrics and both were manufactured locally. In damp areas along the coast flax was cultivated for linen,²⁸ and linen fibers have been identified inside a belt buckle from Quattro Macine.²⁹ Very fine byssus cloth was made from the silky filaments of bivalve mollusks at Taranto and recorded in documents as ταραντίνον.³⁰ Cotton does not seem to have been produced in the Salento until late in the period covered here.³¹

Locally worked leather was used for belts, shoes, and the soles of stockings. Belts and shoes could be trimmed with bronze or iron, and at the village of Apigliano iron was worked on-site.³² Fur, highly prized in medieval Italy, may have been available locally in the form of wolf or cat as well as rabbit and lamb.³³ However, the opulent furs worn in wall paintings by a few painted supplicants and a much larger number of religious figures could not have been manufactured locally, so if they were actually worn and not merely represented they must have been imported.³⁴

Unlike neighboring Calabria, Sicily, and Greece, Apulia probably did not practice sericulture in the Middle Ages, though silk may have been dyed or otherwise treated there.³⁵ In the twelfth century all ten of the Jewish households in Brindisi were associated with the dye industry,³⁶ but the sources do not tell us what fabrics they dyed and wool likely predominated. A part of Grottaglie known as the Lama del Fullonese apparently took its name from the community of Jewish dyers who worked and probably lived there.³⁷ The Jews of Taranto had a monopoly on textile preparation and dyeing in that city, granted initially by William II; from the mid-thirteenth century on they paid the archbishop of Taranto a handsome sum for the privilege.³⁸ However, there is no indication that Jews were restricted to this particular livelihood or that non-Jews could not participate in textile production outside the city of Taranto. The fulling mills at Racale and Ostuni were not associated with Jews.³⁹ It is likely that Jews were active in the dyeing industries at Otranto, Oria, and other cities in southern Italy, as was the case around the Mediterranean.⁴⁰

We possess written sources that have not been used previously to confirm the archaeological and historical evidence for cloth manufacturing in medieval southern Italy. Glosses in the Salentine dialect found in the margins of the eleventh-century Mishnah manuscript now in Parma clarify many of the terms found in the Hebrew text related to the production and sale of cloth. In these marginalia are such terms as kui karmena, he who dyes wool its most common color, red; raiiu, from Latin radius, the weaver’s spindle; savani, from the Greek σάβανον, sabanon, a thick linen cloth.⁴¹ The uniquely Jewish prohibition against mixing together fabrics obtained from animals and plants, specifically wool and linen (sha’atnez), is reiterated in these glosses with the injunction to weave each fabric on its own loom to avoid any accidental mixing⁴² and the warning that one who weaves or wears “impure” fabrics will bring upon himself the wrath of God.⁴³ The local Christians’ tendency to combine different fibers may lie behind the Salentine Jews’ concerns in this regard.⁴⁴ The medieval glossator cites the Palestinian rather than the Babylonian Talmud, which is important evidence for the continued use of that source in southern Italy in the eleventh century.

Judah Romano’s glossary, another heretofore unused source, also sheds light on fourteenth-century Italian textiles and practices. For the entry cuffia, coife, referring to a hair covering, Judah notes that one is permitted on the Sabbath to transport a quantity of nuts or pomegranate peels or skins, or indigo or madder or other colors, sufficient to color a small garment such as a girl’s bonnet.⁴⁵ These materials for dyeing were thus known and available in fourteenth-century Italy.

The most common dyestuffs in medieval Europe were vegetal: woad, from which indigo was derived and which did not require a mordant to make the color adhere, and madder, which yielded red.⁴⁶ According to a Jewish midrash, the madder plant is called (pu’ah), which was also the name of Issachar’s second son about whom it was said, “as this plant colors all things, so the tribe of Issachar colors the whole world with its teachings.”⁴⁷ Pu’ah could also refer to the blue or red obtained from woad.⁴⁸ A blue cloth dyed in the wool could be redyed by the piece with red or yellow (from weld or rose seeds, or saffron) to produce a wide range of other colors, including black,⁴⁹ but each successive dyeing added to the cost of the cloth. Even when such costly dyestuffs as kermes, brazilwood, and shellfish were not used, dyeing was the highest single component of cloth price.⁵⁰ A wide range of colors was available; the ones most prized were lustrous, luminous, and resistant to fading.⁵¹ Many colors—black, red, white, blue—were difficult to obtain, but could be purchased by the wealthy and are recorded in documents. A strong green was a problematic color rarely recorded in notarial acts.⁵²

In the fifteenth century, some Jews were distinguished by color appliqués: the red rotella is visible in two narrative scenes at Soleto [113.sc.1; Plate 14],⁵³ and it may have been the clothing of Jews in late medieval Gallipoli that inspired the local name of a fish, the sciudeo (literally, “Jew-fish”), distinguished by its red and yellow stripes.⁵⁴ Red and yellow stripes are worn by servants—horse grooms—at Santa Maria del Casale near Brindisi [28.H, V; Plate 7]. The two colors are juxtaposed but not striped on the ceiling at Li Monaci [Plate 9] and on the walls and ceiling at Ugento [151.B, C, st.1], all datable to the early fourteenth century.⁵⁵

The poor wore undyed fabrics, and we see two of them, dressed in grayish tones, holding candles in the crypt church of San Nicola at Mottola [76.E; Plate 13]. Yet these are not the individuals who are most often shown in small village churches. Modest as they or their contributions may have been, these supplicant figures usually wear dyed garments that would have communicated a more elevated social identity to contemporary viewers. I do not suggest that this identity was real, or that people actually wore the specific garments shown; more likely these garments are stylistic syntheses, idealizations effected by artists eager to please and open to inspiration from varied sources. I agree with those historians of dress who argue that in commemorative images of people, unlike narrative religious images, artists did not simply work from a prototype, but there is a high degree of sameness among the humble Salentine supplicants.⁵⁶ While blue, greenish gray, white, and yellow are occasionally worn, red (or reddish brown) is by far the color most commonly worn by a painted human figure in the Salento across the Middle Ages. This is the case in Santi Stefani at Vaste [157; Plate 18] and Santa Maria del Casale [28; Plates 5–7], two otherwise very different fourteenth-century monuments. At Vaste, nine different figures are shown in virtually identical red garments. Only the wealthiest patrons could afford richer, more costly dyestuffs like kermes and fine cloths like imported “scarlets,” printed silks, and furs. A few supplicants, mostly in fourteenth-century Roman-rite churches, are shown wearing such obvious luxuries; otherwise, only painted saints and ancillary figures in Christian narrative scenes are depicted in luxurious garments.

Certain special days were occasions for wearing garments of a particular color, which at times distinguished Christians and Jews. The Shibolei ha-Leqet treatise of practical halakha (Jewish law) illuminates this in its discussion of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year:

The custom in the world [ba’olam] is that when a man knows he will be judged he wears black and covers himself in black and grows his beard and does not cut his nails because he does not know what the judgment will be. Jews [Yisrael] do not do this: they wear white and cover themselves in white and shave their beards and cut their nails and eat and drink and are happy during Rosh Hashanah because they know that God is making miracles for them and is judging them favorably. These are the reasons why it is not allowed to fast on Rosh Hashanah.⁵⁷

The supposed black clothing of Christians on Judgment Day is not supported by extant wall paintings, where the damned and the saved in those scenes at Santa Maria del Casale [28.sc.1] and Soleto [113.B] wear many colors, with the same preference for red that characterizes the depictions of supplicants. Perhaps real people did wear dark hues on penitential occasions, however. There are a few more differences in clothing and hairstyles with a religious rationale, but the vast majority of distinctions in clothing depend on gender, age, and social status rather than on faith.

Infants’ and Children’s Clothing

Infants are seldom depicted in extant Salentine wall paintings, except for the Christ child in the Nativity scene and the infant Virgin held by her mother or, in the form of a swaddled soul, by Christ at her dormition [Plate 15]. An infant is recognizable by its tight herringbone swaddling;⁵⁸ regardless of season, strips of white linen were wrapped tightly around the body, mummylike, with only the face left free. Such swaddling was still done in the Salento a century ago⁵⁹ and is an example of medieval realia when found in religious scenes. In nonnarrative images this realistic swaddling is uniformly suppressed, as when Anne holds the infant Mary [32.B] or in countless scenes of Christ in the lap of his mother; this indicates that Mary and Jesus were understood not as infants but as children. Corroboration that swaddling of newborns was also done in Jewish families is found in the fourteenth-century Maimonidean glossary from Rome, where anfasciatu, “bound in strips” (fascie), glosses the Hebrew equivalent.⁶⁰ The same source gives the motive for such wrapping: “one wraps and ties so that the legs and arms are long and straight and not curved and distorted”; moreover, it is permitted to do so on the Sabbath because not doing so endangers the infant’s health. Infantile sabanon, referring to the linen cloth (Greek, ρινάρικος, σάκκινος), is not mentioned in earlier medieval sources.⁶¹

Depictions of children as supplicants are limited to the two daughters at Vaste [157.A] and roughly contemporary mother-daughter pairs at Santa Maria del Casale [28.C, U]; in both cases the girls are dressed just like their mothers in long red garments. In narrative scenes, holy children—Christ, the Virgin, Nicholas at Muro Leccese—are almost always classically dressed in a long robe over a full-length tunic (χιτών). Only occasionally does this costume vary in a way that suggests youthful attire. In the Flight into Egypt at San Vito dei Normanni, Christ’s tunic is short enough to reveal his knee and lower leg, and in the Candelora crypt at Massafra, Christ, being taken to school by his mother, wears a knee-length tunic, a short-sleeved vest or doublet (dubblectus),⁶² and a short blue cape over one shoulder; on his feet are patterned socks or soft boots [63.A]. The children in the Entry to Jerusalem scene at San Vito dei Normanni wear a white knee-length undergarment, the camisia, or καμίσιον, beneath patterned tunics that have been removed for easy tree climbing.⁶³ In general, juvenile clothing did not differ appreciably from that of adults of the same gender.⁶⁴

Male Dress

While all of the male supplicants wore underclothes, none are visible. These would have included breeches (guttela, βρακιά) and a short linen chemise (camisia).⁶⁵ Both are visible in the early fifteenth century at Soleto and Galatina, in narrative scenes that depict condemned persons, torturers, and lowly workers [113.sc.1; Plate 14].⁶⁶ The chemise alone was worn by adult male laborers, including shepherds in Nativity scenes, Nicodemus in the Deposition at San Simeone in Famosa [70.sc], and agricultural workers and builders in the mosaic pavement at Otranto [86.A]. Until a half-century ago this was the typical dress of the Mediterranean peasant,⁶⁷ and no supplicant in the Salento is shown in such penurious and practical attire.

If we review the surviving representations of laymen shown in the pose of a supplicant, we find a variety of costumes, not all of which correspond with terms recorded in documentary sources; perhaps their value was too low to figure in wills or donations. The majority of these depictions date to the end of the Middle Ages and are in contexts where Latin inscriptions predominate. Because the earliest dates to 1196, it is worth considering local examples of male lay dress in the preceding centuries in narrative contexts.

Whether they are intended to be real individuals or historical or imaginary ones, the eleventh-century males on a capital now in Brindisi from the Normanera Benedictine monastery of Sant’Andrea all’Isola seem to wear good Normanera garb [19]. They sport belted knee-length tunics (tunica) over high socks (calza) and ankle-high shoes (calces); some also wear a thick scapular-like garment, perhaps of fur, that falls almost to the hem in front.⁶⁸ At least some of the garments resemble caftans, closed vertically rather than pulled over the head, a fashion derived from the Islamic world that was just emerging in Europe in the eleventh century.⁶⁹ All are belted with a long, often elaborately knotted cord (cingulum).

In the twelfth century styles changed, for those who could afford to follow fashion, to a longer tunic with sleeves called the tunica, cotta, or gonnella.⁷⁰ At San Vito dei Normanni one of the supplicant figures wears a calf-length green tunic, belted at the waist, over contrasting red hose and pointed black ankle-strap shoes trimmed with white dots [109.B]. In this he imitates not so much the adjacent saint whom he venerates, dressed in a green himation over a red tunic and with sandaled feet, as a shepherd in the Nativity scene on the opposite wall, who is even better dressed than he is with pearl trim on his hose, shoes, and the skirt of his short tunic. Moderately pointed shoes became fashionable early in the twelfth century.⁷¹ A second supplicant at San Vito is clad in a knee-length tunic, like the shepherds, this time yellow with a red fringed belt and red socks or stockings [109.C]. A surprising feature of both figures’ garments is how tightly they fit through the torso even though no lacing is visible. This style is documented elsewhere in Europe earlier in the century, generally in conjunction with a floor-length tunic.⁷²

Later male figures in monuments with Greek inscriptions include the affectionate partner at Li Monaci (1314/15) [Plate 9] and figures at Vaste in 1379/80. The latter kneel in long red garments that are cinched at the waist even though the belts themselves are not visible; Antony, in the apse, has a white loop suspended from his, presumably a stylized handkerchief [157.A]. (Handkerchiefs are represented in late Byzantine art but not earlier.)⁷³ Stephen has an identical red robe but with a row of white dots from neck to waist and from the wrists to the elbow [157.K–L]. The dots represent buttons (pumettus, άνάστολες), which began to appear in Byzantium by the eleventh century but were then used only to fasten the front of elite men’s garments.⁷⁴ Flat and spherical buttons are known from excavations at Otranto and elsewhere.⁷⁵

Very similar figures are associated with monuments containing Latin inscriptions. At least four of the fourteenth-century supplicants at Santa Maria del Casale are shown kneeling in plain, tight-sleeved red tunics [28; Plate 5], as is a single figure at Grottaglie’s Cripta delle Nicchie who also has something suspended from his belt [53.D]. Others at Santa Maria del Casale wear more elaborate clothing, with tight buttoned sleeves emerging from a red hooded mantle with elbow-length sleeves; both the sleeves and the hood are lined with fur, either white or the distinctive black-and-white vair [28.I, N, O; Plates 5–6].⁷⁶ (A very similar figure, in red trimmed with vair, is poorly preserved at San Paolo in Brindisi [26.F].) Below a devotional text dated 1335, Nicholas de Marra adores the Virgin and Child in a red tight-sleeved tunic topped by a short cape trimmed with fur [Plate 7]. The four kneeling figures behind him wear two-toned garments of pink and green;⁷⁷ one has a short red cape or hood. None of the kneeling males in this church wear the radically different fashions that would be introduced around mid-century, although the two grooms/standard-bearers here do have extraordinary tall hats [28.V].

At other sites with a preponderance of Latin texts, supplicants are dressed in garments of different colors. At the Candelora crypt in Massafra (thirteenth century), a male kneeling beside Saint Stephen is dressed in a tight-sleeved white tunic and red hose with soles attached [63.B].⁷⁸ Nearby, the male half of the couple in the scene of Christ going to school wears a short blue-gray garment that opens in front over a darker-gray tunic [63.A; Plate 12]. At Masseria Lo Noce near Grottaglie (fourteenth century) the kneeling Daniel is dressed in dark blue; a bulge indicates a traveling hat perched on his back [54.A]. At San Giorgio di Rocca-pampina, the supplicant Calogerius sports a white tunic with red trim at the wrists under a long-sleeved light-blue garment, a iuppa (γιούππα) that has triangular gores inserted or is slashed at the front and sides to reveal both its red lining and the tunic underneath [92.B]. Red hose or shoes complete the outfit. And at Santa Maria di Cerrate, a kneeling fourteenth-century supplicant accompanied by the church’s sole Latin inscription witnesses the Koimesis in a blue-green tunic under a tight-sleeved white robe lined in red [114.F–G; Plate 15].

Dramatic changes in male attire attested elsewhere in Italy in the mid-fourteenth century penetrated the Salento some decades later. Inspired by French fashions introduced at the Angevin court in Naples during the 1330s and seen in the following years in Rome, Florence, and Milan, fashionable men began to eschew the long tunic in favor of a knee-length, belted woolen gonnella over a short padded jacket, the farsetto or jupparellu (so called in Naples in 1314); this was attached to stockings now visible to the upper thigh and attached by laces to the new shorter breeches.⁷⁹ By midcentury the gonnella was so tight that laces and buttons were required to put it on, and in the 1360s–70s the gonnella was made to adhere not only to the chest but also to the flanks, with these areas emphasized by padding.⁸⁰ The wealthy never went out wearing only the gonnella, however; status demanded multiple overgarments.⁸¹ The tighter styles were criticized already in a 1335 edict issued by King Robert of Naples, even though it was his own courtiers who were popularizing the style; clergy and moralists also bewailed the decadent new fashions.⁸² For practical and economic reasons the peasantry never adopted the short and tight garments, just as they had rejected the change in the twelfth century to longer, trailing ones.⁸³ Several of the laymen depicted at Galatina, Soleto, and Santi Niccolò e Cataldo in Lecce [58.sc.1] in the early fifteenth century wear the new fashions, while others maintain older sartorial standards.

Distinctive clothing was worn to signal such specialized professions as warrior, monk, cleric, or ruler. Soldiers are rare, surviving only in two late medieval monuments that both contain exclusively Latin inscriptions. At Santa Maria del Casale a helmeted Leonardo di Tocco is presented to the enthroned Virgin and Christ, followed by seventeen similarly outfitted men who kneel with hands clasped while leaning on striped shields [28.D; Plate 4]. Di Tocco’s image seems curiously unfinished because the blue, and perhaps other colors too, has all but disappeared; witness the Virgin’s tunic, which bears only traces of its original hue. (Because much of the scene immediately below has also been lost, I assume water damage affected this part of the nave.) Over a longer white tunic he wears a tight-sleeved red one, and over this is a diagonally striped, apparently quilted garment that has entirely lost its color. This surcoat, or coat armor, either has short red scalloped sleeves or covers another one that does. On his head is a gently curved helmet that dips lower in the back; because the helmet is of one piece and not two it is not a proper chapelde-fer (kettle hat). However, it does appear to have a bevor, the attached rigid feature that protects the ears and neck.⁸⁴ Like the saint who presents him to the Virgin and Child, di Tocco wears diagonally striped upper-arm ailettes that had a decorative and heraldic function;⁸⁵ this is borne out by the fact that the shields and horses at the right of the panel also bear diagonal stripes.⁸⁶

The praying figures who carry shields behind di Tocco are for the most part better preserved [Plate 4]. They all wear mail coifs and collars attached to mail hauberks that reach their knees and elbows. Over this is a red surcoat with scalloped sleeves. From the knees down are red leggings, possibly over mail chausses. Their helmets range from plain rounded ones to two-part basinets to elaborately crested or feathered examples. One soldier wears a very tall cap covered with red-and-yellow fabric with a scalloped fabric panel behind the neck. All of them carry flat-topped, diagonally striped shields with curved sides, the standard form of western European shield by the late thirteenth century. What is surprising about this panel is not so much the amount of seemingly realistic detail relative to other figures at Casale as the fact that the armor shown is probably not the most up-to-date; by the 1360s plate armor was widely used, and its complete substitution for mail is apparent from fifteenth-century depictions at, for example, Cerrate and Soleto.

The rowel spur over mail chausses visible on the right presbytery wall at Casale, under the fresco stratum with the well-preserved Virgin and Child, Erasmus, and Mary Magdalene, probably belongs to a lost warrior saint and certainly to the period soon after 1300 [28.P; Plate 6]. One of the earliest representations of such equipment is worn by a Byzantine soldier in a History of Outremer manuscript produced in Lombardy circa 1291–95, but it remains unclear whether rowel spurs were Byzantine or Italian in origin.⁸⁷

A knight kneeling beside Saint Antony Abbot at Galatina, just above the saint’s pig, is accompanied by an inscription signed by the artist and dated 1432 [47.D].⁸⁸ The man is often thought to represent the patron of the church, Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, but I see little reason for this identification. He is dressed in thigh-length chain mail over a tight-sleeved red tunic and leggings, one red and one white. Over this ensemble are a sleeveless green mantle and a wide belt, part of which juts out oddly to visually tether him to the saint’s mantle.

Turning now to a more common category of male imagery, there are a few examples of monks represented in the characteristic pose of veneration. Two figures at Miggiano whose proskynesis (veneration) is literally (mis)spelled out (“προ[σ]κηνισις”) are identified further in Greek as “Leo the monk” and “Nicholas the monk,” but with three figures depicted it is unclear whether only two are monastic [73.A–B]. Perhaps they are the two bearded figures, but these two are dressed differently and only Nicholas, the one shown bending over in full proskynesis, wears monastic garb; the other bearded figure, by far the largest and also the only one not named, sports a tight-sleeved garment with decorated wrists under a bluish robe with a decorated hem. The ornamented hem would seem to remove him from the monastic ranks. The uppermost figure, Leo, is dressed like the crouching Nicholas but lacks a beard; perhaps he is a young monk. An enigmatic beardless figure I discovered on the east wall at Li Monaci may be a monk; he wears a red-brown robe with a bunched neckline but his head is uncovered [43.B]. The brown-robed, hooded figure kneeling beside a female saint in the Crocefisso della Macchia cave is certainly a monk [34]. He even has a cord for a belt.

While it is relatively easy to compare the dress of monastic supplicants with the costumes worn by monastic saints, who are plentiful in Salentine churches, it is less easy to know whether a clerical supplicant has been represented in accord with sainted models. While bishops are attested epigraphically as patrons, they are not shown in extant monuments. The same is true for deacons; at least four are attested in inscriptions, but none are identifiable as painted supplicants. The only distinctive article of clothing occasionally worn by saintly deacons is the orarion, the striped prayer shawl worn over the left shoulder by, for example, Saint Stephen in the Candelora crypt at Massafra [63.B]. Unlike these other clerics, Salentine priests are not only cited but also depicted as supplicants. At Vaste in 1379/80, a tonsured priest named George kneels in prayer beside the Virgin and Child [157.G]. He wears a tight-sleeved red tunic under a white surcoat with loose elbow-length sleeves; the surcoat may be slit like that of Calogerius at Palagianello [92.B], though no colored lining is visible. At Otranto, in the same century, a tonsured priest identified in Latin as presbyter John, son of a magister, wears a similar color scheme [87.B]. A white, tight-sleeved tunic is visible under a red cape with a dark decorated neckline; a blue maniple hangs from his left wrist.

The representation of men’s footwear ranges, as noted above, from soled stockings in a neutral hue to bright-red socks and pointed, pearl-trimmed strappy shoes. Sandals seem to have been associated in painting only with the classical garb of long-ago saints. On sacred figures shown as nonnarrative icons sandals predominate, although Pope Leo the Great wears soft black shoes at the Candelora crypt, as does Vitus at the Buona Nuova in Massafra [62]. Footwear in narrative scenes usually consists of sandals, although in the Flight into Egypt scene at San Vito dei Normanni, the young James leading the donkey on which Mary rides wears what look like soft brown calf-high boots (botta) over bright-blue stockings; these “boots” were actually a second pair of rolled-down stockings. Except for children and laborers, who might be barefoot and stockingless, men wore woolen stockings that covered the feet and legs, often with sewn-on leather soles (the distinction between shoes and socks is postmedieval). These stockings were held up by cords and eventually attached by laces to the breeches worn by the well-to-do. Shibolei ha-Leqet confirms that men’s hose have laces to connect them to their breeches, and also cites a contemporary opinion that a man may wear two outer garments or two sets of stockings when it is cold on the Sabbath.⁸⁹ Judah Romano’s fourteenth-century glossary contains the injunction that one should not appear before important persons without proper leg coverings,⁹⁰ and surely this was true for men of status regardless of religious affiliation. Circular iron shoe buckles have been found at Apigliano and Campi Salentina, and boot hobnails were discovered in one tomb.⁹¹ A bronze shoelace tip was found at Otranto.⁹² Some men must have worn sandals, sandalia, and Shibolei ha-Leqet permits them even though there is a risk that the laces might break, rendering them forbidden footwear on the Sabbath.⁹³ None of the Salentine men sports either elegant colored shoes or the practical types of medieval footwear made of wood (patinus, τζώκουλος) or with cork soles (summellara, φελλοκάλλιγον), even though these are attested in notarial sources in Apulia.⁹⁴ Finally, very few males wear headgear in local paintings. The red cap at Lecce [58.C] and the coppula (chaperon) at Li Monaci [43.C; Plate 9] are rare exceptions.

Female Dress

There is more to say on the topic of female clothing and accessories even though many more female supplicants were included (though not named) in inscriptions than are depicted on walls or carved on tombstones; the disparity here is much greater than it is for males. Nevertheless, here, too, we can bring into the discussion both archaeological and untapped documentary sources to flesh out the pictorial evidence.

As I have argued elsewhere, the identification of a kneeling figure at Muro Leccese as a mid-eleventh-century Byzantine empress is incorrect [77.A].⁹⁵ Marina Falla Castelfranchi identified her as Zoe, wife of Constantine IX Monomachos, and argued that she is present in this church originally dedicated to Saint Nicholas because of imperial involvement in renovations at the original shrine of Nicholas in Myra in 1042.⁹⁶ For Falla, the Muro Leccese image records a contemporary historical scene. However, the tiny figure kneels alongside a huge enthroned one who is probably Christ or the Virgin and not Nicholas, because even though only the lower half of this monumental figure is preserved there is no trace of the episcopal omophorion.⁹⁷ Such an outsized Christ, or indeed any such oversized devotional focus, is not found in Salento churches before the thirteenth century. Nor can the kneeling figure’s attire be dated before the thirteenth century, the earliest possible date for the scooped neck and pearl-like buttons from wrist to elbow.⁹⁸ Before the late eleventh century buttons were limited to the front of upper-class male garments. The figure is not dressed even remotely like an imperial personage: she wears a blue-gray tight-sleeved garment cinched by a brown leather or fabric belt, much like many other female supplicants discussed below. While the buttons on the sleeve were certainly expensive items, there is no loros (jeweled ceremonial scarf) or any of the expected accoutrements befitting an empress. What appears at first glance to be a crown⁹⁹ is, rather, an elaborate hairstyle, parted in the center and bound with a fabric net (reticella, ριτικέλλα),¹⁰⁰ seemingly of red silk where it meets the forehead. Because it is the same shade of brown as the long braid that falls down the woman’s back it may be a fabric caul (caia, cala, κάγια) but it cannot be a crown, although nuptial crowns (corona, στέφανος) were used in the Salento until the twentieth century. Fourteenth-century aristocrats, but not empresses, might wear a crown directly over the hair rather than atop a veil.¹⁰¹ A review of imperial regalia, both surviving and represented in artwork, confirms a lack of parallels with the figure at Muro.¹⁰² In addition, her pallor and the modeling of the exposed neck are thirteenth-century features unparalleled among the extant figures at Muro Leccese. Most telling, perhaps, is her kneeling and hands-clasped pose, which was not introduced until the middle of the thirteenth century and is explored further in Chapter 6.

Also datable to the thirteenth century are two back-to-back females holding lit candles at San Nicola in Mottola [76.E; Plate 13].¹⁰³ One faces Pope Leo the Great and the other the empress Helena. While the left-hand figure has a broader face, both have long hair trailing down the back like the woman at Muro Leccese, and they are dressed identically in wide-belted V-neck tunics, one off-white and one greenish-gray. The belts are probably fabric sashes, because they lack the trailing ends and metal ornamentation of leather belts so well attested archaeologically from funerary contexts. Both wear black shoes or soled stockings. Although the elaborateness of their dress is very different, the V-necks and lit candles suggest that the painted person of uncertain gender in the rock-cut Santa Marina at Massafra is also a thirteenth-century female [67.E]. She abuts a saint who is datable to the thirteenth century on stylistic grounds. The supplicant wears a white tunic under an orange V-neck outer garment that is draped below the bust with a white fabric ornamented with red roundels and red stripes, knotted at the waist. The sartorial details are difficult to understand.

On the south wall at Santa Maria del Casale are five different women, four of them wearing one or two layers of red clothing. In the other case, a woman venerates a male saint, perhaps a bishop, with her clasped hands crossing the painted border between them [28.K]. Either her hair is light brown or all of it is bound in a fabric caul that matches her golden-brown cloak. On the opposite wall, a kneeling woman being presented to the Virgin and Child by a deacon saint wears a white tunic and red mantle trimmed across the shoulders and at the elbow-length sleeves with white fur [28.R, top]. These are either extremely wide sleeve openings or the lining of a mantle; because of the height of the panel and its state of preservation it is impossible to be sure. The regally attired saint who is the first female to be saved in the Last Judgment on the west wall of the same church has similarly wide bell-shaped sleeves also lined in white, probably the silk-lined diopezzi, or διπλούνι, distinct from a simpler gonnella [28.sc.1].

Another group of female supplicants is found at Vaste in 1379/80, but all of these figures are tiny in comparison to their equivalents at Brindisi. In the apse, all three women wear tight-sleeved dark-red garments, two with white trim at the neck (the last figure, presumably Ioanna, is almost entirely lost) [157.A–B]. Maria, but not her mother, has pearl-button trim on her sleeves from elbow to wrist and a long black belt likewise adorned with white dots. Additional women at Vaste are shown individually and are similarly dressed, with only slight variations in belts and in the way the head scarf is worn [157.I–J, N]. Two of them have the pendant white loop of a handkerchief like several of the men [157.C–D, N; Plate 18]. None hide their bodies in the capacious mantle typically represented as female attire in Orthodox church paintings of the fourteenth century.

No painted female supplicant has distinctive or even very visible footwear. There are no depictions of what the fourteenth-century Hebrew glossary calls ferri, chains for the feet; it notes that women may not go outside on the Sabbath with the chains on the feet used by some girls to avoid taking overly long steps that might endanger their virginity.¹⁰⁴ Nor do we find representations of the small bells that were used as ornaments on female clothing. When worn by Jewish women, these bronze or gold canpanelli, worn at the throat, had to be muffled on the Sabbath.¹⁰⁵

The article of female clothing represented with the greatest detail and variety is headgear and, to a lesser degree, belts. The belt fittings of supplicating figures are in every case simplified versions, usually rendered as pearl-like dots, of what were actually metal attachments that varied in form (butterflies, rosettes); buckles, too, were apparently unique to the wearer.¹⁰⁶ The large number of medieval Latin and Greek terms for women’s hair coverings and ornaments is paralleled in such Jewish sources as the Maimonidean glossary, where the Hebrew HDDD, sbakha, is glossed by a whole series of vernacular terms, including grata, a small gilded hairnet; entreççiatori, reticella, cuffia, coife, parati, cappella, and others.¹⁰⁷ The most typical form of female hair embellishment is the scarf or mantilla worn by the women at Vaste [157.A–B, I–J, N; Plate 18] and one in the south transept at Santa Maria del Casale who predates the more aristocratic women in the nave [28.M].¹⁰⁸ The scarf could be tied behind the neck or lowered over the face as necessary.

Neither male nor female supplicants are ever depicted in the finery worn by the saints and even by some ancillary figures in Christian narrative scenes. If we limit our inquiry to belts and headgear of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we find that sacred images offer both greater variety and more detailed representation that must have been based in some reality. Some notable female head coverings may be seen, for example, on the three girls whose dowry Saint Nicholas provides at Santa Margherita at Mottola [75.sc]: their head scarves are white, but with red and blue stripes and with long metal pendilia (hanging ornaments) attached (perhaps the masuli of the notarial sources).¹⁰⁹ The girls’ outer garments are also elaborately patterned and two wear a ring brooch at the throat.¹¹⁰ At Alezio, Saint Marina wears not a simple pearl-decorated hair ribbon but a precious hairnet woven with dozens of pearls, the kankellata or filo di perle,¹¹¹ and one of the midwives in the Nativity there has the same item. At Casaranello, several women in the scenes of Saint Catherine’s life wear over their head scarves a pullurico, a cap with a rigid border and soft top, although notarial sources suggest that this was earlier worn only by men.¹¹² The facing vita cycle of Saint Margaret has a wonderful variety of head coverings, including the common bonnet, the coif or buctarella, tied under the chin or behind the neck and worn even to bed [33.sc.2].¹¹³ Opulent dress is worn by Saint Lucy at the Buona Nuova crypt in Massafra [62]—the wall painting invariably cited to illustrate belt fittings in context. Here a blue tunic with jeweled trim at the neckline and golden buttons at the wrists is covered by a red belt studded with metal fittings and a cloak lined in green. In her hair the saint wears an elaborate jeweled headpiece, perhaps the catasfactulum or capistrinculo of the early sources, a circlet designed to keep her hair under the transparent veil that falls to her shoulders.¹¹⁴ Equally splendid is a Saint Margaret at San Simeone in Famosa, wearing a gemmed crown over the pearl net that restrains her hair. Over her extraordinary tunic with a red-and-blue roundel pattern is a red cloak with golden laces and a purple belt with silver and gold cross-shaped ornaments. It is quite clear that not only saints but also nonsainted figures in medieval Salentine art are often shown in clothing of much greater variety and opulence than that worn by painted supplicants. This is especially true of their jewelry.

Jewelry

Women’s jewelry is always an aspect of social status, yet none of it is visible in painted depictions of real women; only saints and figures in narrative scenes wear earrings or an occasional brooch. Yet jewelry is well attested in written sources, mostly in the form of prohibitions of excessive public display, and it is also plentiful in the archaeological record. Many pieces have been found in graves where they represent family wealth that was ostentatiously, or at least visibly, buried. I discuss women’s jewelry further in Chapter 4, “Status.”

Like their modern descendants, some medieval men wore decorated belts, rings, and even earrings.¹¹⁵ The sage Isaiah of Trani is cited in Shibolei ha-Leqet as being uncertain whether men can wear rings in public on the Sabbath; they might be tempted to remove them for display, as women were sure to do, and so violate the day of rest.¹¹⁶ From this we can deduce that some Jewish men wore rings in Apulia and in Rome in the thirteenth century. Bishops and some other Romanrite ecclesiastics wore rings on their gloved hands, such as Eligius (labeled in Greek) at Vaste [157.C]; an unidentified bishop in the Supersano crypt wears at least ten of them [118.st.1].¹¹⁷ This practice was criticized by the eleventh-century Byzantine patriarch Michael Keroularios as “abominable and heretical.”¹¹⁸ Only a rare late medieval layman, like the elegantly dressed one who has insinuated himself into a group of bishops, monks, and even the pope adoring Saint Benedict in Santi Niccolò e Cataldo at Lecce [58.C], is shown with three rings on his white-gloved right hand. His jewelry and garments clearly advertise his social rank.

While the presence of earrings has always been assumed to identify a female burial, earrings have been found in adult men’s graves in the Balkans. Dated between the eleventh and early thirteenth centuries, they were often found in conjunction with finger rings.¹¹⁹ Beginning in the twelfth century, some ancillary male figures in Christian scenes—boys laying down their garments in Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, men unwinding Lazarus’s shroud—also wear earrings. Maria Parani associated these depictions with a general knowledge of “oriental” dress, with specific local fashions, and with a growing Byzantine interest in representing realistic details.¹²⁰ Yet the motives for occasionally representing Christ himself with an earring, also starting in the twelfth century, are more complex.¹²¹ This occurs at the Crocefisso crypt at Ugento and is such an anomalous detail that it must have been requested specifically by its anonymous patron [Plate 17].

The earring worn by the Christ child at Ugento is adorned with a cross hanging from the ring that pierces his ear. This earring type has no archaeological parallels in the Salento or anywhere else, and pictorial comparanda are also difficult to find. There are Roman Republican coins in which female personifications wear a cruciform earring, but those crosses hang heavily from the earlobe and are not attached to a ring;¹²² in any case, it seems unlikely that a chance coin find inspired an image nearly fourteen centuries later. To understand Christ’s earring we should consider its immediate context [151.st]. The Virgin holding the Child is dressed ornately in a blue tunic outlined at the neck, wrists, and hem with gold and jeweled embroidery. Over this she wears a red mantle, open in front, over half of which an additional white mantilla embroidered with red flowers has been obliquely placed; the mantilla matches the textile on the back of her throne. In her hand she holds a lily. The additional veil is often found on Byzantine icons from Cyprus, of which the earliest attestation is a late twelfth-century icon bearing the epithet “covered by God,” to which the veil may refer; by about 1260 the diagonal veil is found in southern Italy.¹²³ The unexpected luxury of this image contrasts sharply with another Mother and Child on the same wall of the crypt that cannot be much earlier in date; there the Virgin sports her usual brownish maphorion (hooded mantle) closed over the blue mantle, with no extra veil, and the Child lacks jewelry. A difference in patronage seems obvious. Is one image a response to the other—a humbler and more traditional offering to counter the showier version? Or a fancier-looking one to update and “westernize,” via the lily and the Virgin’s open mantle, the retardataire version down the wall? Neither scenario explains the earring. Perhaps the intent was to include a cross in the scene, thus making explicit the formal and typological link between the Virgin holding the infant Christ and, ultimately, the dead one. Perhaps the benefactor him- or herself wore just such a cross as an earring or pendant.

The function of a small cross at this time was protective; it might or might not contain a relic. While this would seem to be superfluous in the case of Christ, he wears a different amulet in another Salento painting, this one at San Nicola at Mottola [76.sc.1]. At the neck of his white garment decorated with parallel red strokes is a red circle with a dot inside. That this is not a brooch—“just jewelry”—is clear from a comparison with the girls aided by Saint Nicholas in the adjacent crypt dedicated to Saint Margaret, where the horizontal pin of the annular brooches is clearly visible [75.sc.1]. Christ’s “adornment” serves no practical function; it does not close his garment at the throat. Like the cross earring, it seems to be an apotropaic device of the type we shall consider in Chapter 7.

Hairstyles and Beards

In the following chapter on status I assess female head coverings as signifiers of age and marital status. Here I focus on men’s hair, which is far more visible than women’s because it is so rarely covered in our surviving paintings. Hair and beards were of great importance in the Middle Ages precisely because of their visibility, and the treatment of hair by its owner or by someone else was a social act that signaled group identity and could have important consequences.¹²⁴

Although bearded men are plentiful in narrative imagery [33.sc.1], there are few bearded supplicants in the Salento and none with noticeably long hair. In the thirteenth century, two of the three monks at Miggiano have beards [73.A] and that of the kneeling Nicholas is fairly long, ending in two distinct points [73.A.2]. Even longer is the beard worn by the hooded monk at Casarano [34.A]. In the fourteenth century, two panels at Santa Maria del Casale contain a kneeling mail-clad man with a trim beard; the one in Leonardo di Tocco’s retinue has a fine mustache as well and is further distinguished by his unique crested helmet [28.D; Plate 4]. An earlier panel there [28.V; Plate 7] reveals that two of the five figures kneeling behind Nicholas de Marra have short beards, one has a mustache, and several have blond hair to the shoulders. Thus the scant evidence for both longer hair and beards is skewed to the late period. The absence of these features in the earlier medieval centuries reflects the paucity of early devotional figures in general; it does not tell us that the proportions of bearded to nonbearded men differed at opposite ends of the Middle Ages. On the basis of imagery from outside the region, however, we know that fashions in men’s hair changed continuously.

The meanings of different hairstyles depended on cultural and historical contexts and varied according to such factors as a man’s age, status, profession, and state of mind. Hair could be simultaneously magical, sexual, and social.¹²⁵ In many cultures facial hair was a metonym for masculinity or worldliness: Byzantine monks “cast off the hair of the world”¹²⁶ when they received their tonsure. We find these notions addressed in eighteenth-century collections of proverbs in the Salentine dialect. Some of these date to the early modern period, but others are probably much older:

Bbarba d‘ommu e ccuta de cane, guàrdale e nnu lle tuccare.

Beard of man and tail of dog, look but don’t touch.

Bbarba janca, specchiu de morte.

White beard, mirror of death.

La bbarba nu fface l‘ommu.

The beard does not make the man.

Guardati da femina barbuta e da uomo senza barba.

Protect yourself from women with beards and men without.¹²⁷

That the topic of hair and beards resonated in the medieval Salento is proved by a short treatise produced in the 1220s and copied at least four times in the thirteenth century alone. Περὶ Γενείων, On the Beard, deals with the hair and beard preferences of “the Greeks” as expressed by Nicholas-Nektarios, the learned abbot of one of the most important Orthodox monasteries in the Salento, San Nicola at Casole, which had been founded under the patronage of the Norman rulers in 1098/99.¹²⁸ The bilingual (Greek and Latin) treatise was appended to Nicholas-Nektarios’s Τρία Συντάγματα, Three Constitutions, which dealt with topics of cultural disagreement that will be discussed in later chapters. It is worth translating the text in full:

It is not necessary for us to write or collect in this treatise about beards or even about some other things held by custom, but because of some of the ignorant who boast especially in shaving but despise those who heed the [true] form of man, we will write a little about these, by way of a separate note outside of our treatise.

The faithful must not shave, as one finds in the first book of the Apostolic Constitutions, chapter three [1.3.11], which forbids this. It says the faithful must not corrupt the hair of their beard and change the form of man against nature. For the law of Moses [Lev. 19:27] says you will not pluck your beards. For God the Creator made this seemly for women (sc., to have smooth faces). He ordained it unfit for men. But you by so doing, because of an allurement, oppose the law and become abominable in the eyes of God who created you in his own image. So if you wish to please God, refrain from all that he hates and stop doing anything that displeases him.

As for the Latin: now the Church of Rome has adopted this, he says, since what the impious did in violence against the Apostle Peter, plucking out his beard, we do reckoning the violence against him an honor even in this, such as also cutting in a circle the heads of the Latin and Greek priests.

Next the Greek: we have adopted this entirely because of the crown of thorns and because men’s not growing hair is a precept in both the Old and New Testament, just like not shaving the beard. Who is the one who asserts this against the apostolic tradition, although we know this entirely without a Council? But why, we will not say. Now there was an Anacletus born in Herakleia [in] Thrace, as is written in the Chronicle of the Genealogies of the Apostles of Rome, and we have often read in your books how it was Anacletus who ordered tonsure and beards to be shaved. He was by birth a Greek and from Thracian Herakleia.

And enough about beards.¹²⁹

Nicholas-Nektarios here asserts that the Latin custom of shaving the beard is unnatural and unmanly, based on the Westerners’ misunderstanding of the third-century Didascalia apostolorum, which states that “you should not corrupt the traces of your beard or change the natural figure of your face or change it to other than it is and God created it.”¹³⁰ While the “Latins” claim that shaving and tonsuring were introduced in memory of Saint Peter having his hair and beard torn out, the “Greeks” held these depilations to be unauthorized reforms.¹³¹ The resulting shape of Peter’s torn-out hair was understood as an imitation of the crown of thorns, and therefore served as a model for Western monks and clerics but not for Orthodox ones.¹³² This was not new: the same issues had been cited as contributing to the mutual excommunications of 1054.¹³³ What is relevant here is the specifically Salentine context for the objections, and the possibility of considering the hair of Saint Peter as emblematic in the thirteenth century when most of the images of supplicants, as well as most of the depictions of Saint Peter, were executed.

Priests and Monks

Clerical shaving and tonsuring had a long history in medieval Europe, as Giles Constable’s extensive treatment of the topic attests. The problem is that the textual evidence is contradictory; even with repeated anathemas on long hair and beards, many clerics still wore them. Sometimes this was permanent, a product of personal preference as a sign of dignity or age; sometimes it was temporary, when the man was fasting or traveling.¹³⁴ Most of the popes and bishops in the eleventh and twelfth centuries appear to have had a beard. Shaving was certainly laborious and painful. In the twelfth century, a European monk was permitted to shave only fourteen, seven, or six times per year, according to the Cluniacs, Cistercians, and Carthusians, respectively,¹³⁵ so few monks were truly beardless if indeed these regulations were enforced. By contrast, in some twelfth-century Byzantine monasteries a haircut required the permission of the abbot or fifty prostrations would be exacted as punishment, and there was no monastic legislation about beards.¹³⁶

Iconography bears out the textual inconsistencies without, unfortunately, revealing local or chronological patterns. In general, European monks were expected to cut their beards, but not too closely and not too often, and not all of them did so.¹³⁷ Byzantine monks were not so concerned about this aspect of monastic comportment and completely beardless eunuchs could become monks or priests.¹³⁸ What was strongly discouraged was religious men paying too much attention to their hair or letting it grow so long that gender distinctions might become confused. While the general picture of Roman-rite monastics and churchmen cutting their hair and beards and Orthodox-rite equivalents growing theirs is probably correct, individuals or communities could easily defy these “dictates.”

An angry passage by Eustathios, the archbishop of Thessalonike, who in 1185 was an eyewitness to the sack of his city by Normans from southern Italy, applies to clerics (victims) and soldiers (perpetrators) and should not be construed as referring to laymen in general:

And even when leaving us alone in other respects, they [the Normans] concentrated their schemes against the heads of each of us, showing an equal dislike both for our long hair and for our long beards. It was not possible to see a man or a boy of any station in life who did not have his hair cut short all around, like the proverbial Hektor’s crop I suppose, or cut short in front in the manner of Theseus, whereas their hair previously used to be worn in the opposite manner, like the Abantes, and not like these Latins, who wore theirs cut round in a circle and were, so to speak, hairy-crowned. And in paying attention to our hair, the Latins made use at one moment of a razor, at another of a knife, and the more hasty among them used a sword; and then a man who had been shaved in this way would also be relieved of his beard. It became a rarity to see in any place a Greek whose head was still untampered with. The situation was the reverse of the saying, “Not a hair of our heads shall be touched.” For our many sins, for which we have “paid the penalty early” in the words of the one who declared that he would early slay the wicked of the land and would destroy the wrongdoers from the city of the Lord, brought disaster reaching as high as our very own hairs, so that we were completely exposed to the cold, with even our heads stripped bare. And if any man’s beard escaped and hung down in an orderly manner in accordance with nature, then these wretched barbers grabbed it with one hand, and the hair of his head with the other, and said that all was well with the latter hair but not with the former, jesting over matters which were not fit for mirth.¹³⁹

Hyperbole is a time-tested rhetorical device and such an exaggerated account should not be taken at face value. The real reasons for Norman aggression against Byzantine bodies in 1185 had little to do with opinions about hair and beards and much to do with anger over Byzantine attacks on Europeans three years earlier in Constantinople.

Is the prostrating Nicholas at Miggiano an Orthodox or a Roman-rite monk [73.A]? His hair curls down to the nape of his neck but is hardly the unshorn hair one might have expected from Eustathios’s description. “Long” and “short” are relative terms, as are “shaved” and “tonsured.”¹⁴⁰ His name is no help, as Nicholas was extremely popular regardless of the holder’s religion. Yet because he is identified in Greek in a site that has exclusively Greek tituli and Orthodox iconographic details, I think he is likely to be an Orthodox monk—just like his beardless companion Leo.¹⁴¹ The priest named George at Vaste [157.G], kneeling upright next to the Virgin and Child in 1379/80, has a tonsure, and he or his father was an oblate of Saint Stephen, an office that did not exist in the Orthodox world. Was George then a Roman-rite priest despite his supplication in Greek? I argue the contrary in Chapter 8, where Vaste emerges as a paradigmatic work of cultural translation.

Laymen’s Hair

Because most of our painted human figures are laymen, we need to ask whether a bearded/Orthodox versus unbearded/Latin distinction held for this group. For these men the dictates of fashion were probably even more mutable than the inconsistent directives for priests and monks, so the caveat about generalizations and exceptions applies even more strongly. In the first half of the eleventh century beards were fashionable in Europe; by the second half most men shaved, and this continued into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as recorded in both Greek and Latin sources.¹⁴² Italian men alone seem to have revived the full-bearded look in the early fourteenth century,¹⁴³ but this proved of short duration.

In Byzantium, as elsewhere, churchmen attempted to influence male fashion. A contemporary of Eustathios, Archbishop Michael Choniates of Athens, criticized the fact that (some) members of his flock were shaving: “Whoever puts off the manly hair of his chin has unconsciously transformed himself from a man into a woman … shame indeed it is to don a unisex appearance like the hermaphrodites of ancient Greece!”¹⁴⁴ Yet the reality was that some men were cutting their hair despite what the bishop had to say, and if they were doing it in Athens they were surely doing it in the Salento as well. In addition, a text produced in Otranto in the thirteenth century indicates that “among the Hellenes” (παρά Ἕλλησιν) one shaved the beard to honor the dead, so it was indeed acceptable at certain times.¹⁴⁵ Generalizations might not hold true for a specific individual at a particular moment in his life.

The figures shown on the so-called dancers’ capital now in Brindisi probably reflect in some degree the appearance of real Normans. All eight of the men have short hair and (probably) no beard [19]. While the pavements at Taranto (1160) and Otranto (1163–65) cannot be said unequivocally to depict contemporary men, the males generally have short hair and are beardless. But this does not mean that Normans in general were short-haired like the soldiers who ravaged Thessalonike. We should listen to the Norman historian Orderic Vitalis when he tells us, in 1142, that “effeminate men had dominion throughout the world.… They parted their hair in the middle, they let it grow long, as women do, and carefully tended it, and they delighted in wearing excessively tight undershirts and tunics.” He goes on to criticize pointed, curving shoes, unnecessary trains, and long, wide sleeves; in short, these men “rejected the ways of heroes, ridiculed the counsel of priests, and persisted in their barbarous style of dress and way of life.”¹⁴⁶

In later medieval narrative scenes that had less of a moralizing ax to grind, variety in hairstyle was eminently possible. We see this in the thirteenth-century Betrayal of Christ scene at Casaranello, where several soldiers have a short beard and mustache [33.sc.1].¹⁴⁷ In the early fourteenth-century Last Judgment scene at the Roman-rite Santa Maria del Casale, the saved cleric farthest to the left has a tonsure and a beard [28.A]. The reason was surely the desire to communicate a range of ages, rather than the explicit presence of “Easterners” and “Westerners.”

In fifteenth-century monuments a bowl-type haircut is favored, as at Nardò and Galatina (1432) [47.D]. Laymen followed fashion, and most European men in the thirteenth century had short hair; priests and monks were not their follicular role models. Just as men might change their names to fit into a new social hierarchy, they could easily change their hair for the same reason. Hair was as much a part of a man’s situational identity as hair coverings were for women. The public setting of depicted devotional figures meant that their clothing and hairstyle needed to be in the realm of the recognizable, conventional, and acceptable. Yet like the clothing on display, the hairstyle might still be more idealized and symbolic than descriptive.

Saint Peter’s Hair

Saint Peter was at the heart of Nicholas-Nektarios’s comments on men’s head and facial hair and differing attitudes toward it on the part of “Greeks” and “Latins.” He would therefore seem to offer an interesting test case: did Peter serve as a model for the hair or beards of depicted monks or priests or laymen? Put another way, did texts—or that particular text—have any effect on local images?

Peter’s physical traits are described in accounts written by Epiphanius of Salamis, John Malalas, Elpius the Roman, and others: an older man with gray or white hair and a short beard.¹⁴⁸ Despite this general consensus Peter’s specific iconography and attributes varied, which made him a rather unusual case in Byzantine art. This mutability was noted by Kurt Weitzmann in his study of the thirteenth-century Saint Peter icon at Dumbarton Oaks; moreover, he argued that Peter’s iconography in Byzantium after 1054 deliberately responded to political and religious differences between the (so-called) East and West and that the Byzantines deliberately avoided depicting Peter in the roll-type hairstyle associated with Rome.¹⁴⁹ However, a survey of Petrine images challenges Weitzmann’s hypothesis. Within the general iconographic parameters there was great variety in the Byzantine world and significant variety even in Rome itself.¹⁵⁰ In the Salento, Peter is seldom represented the same way twice. With a full head of overlapping fish-scale hair, he is paired with a tonsured Pope Leo in the eleventh-century San Nicola at Mottola, probably repainted in the thirteenth century [76.st.1]. In the same church, Peter is also shown with a smooth heart-shaped hairline, and a third time with tight corkscrew curls falling from a central point. None of the Salento supplicants looks remotely like him in any of these depictions; in fact, none of them is shown as elderly. The fact that Peter is depicted with numerous hairstyle variations reflects in a general way the variety that no doubt characterized real men’s hair, but in no case does a painted supplicant share specific features of Petrine representation.

How then should we understand the focus on Saint Peter and the sudden appeal of such a treatise in the thirteenth century? It was certainly part of a larger discourse in the period after 1204 when Byzantine and Orthodox identity were under pressure, resulting in an increased production of texts and images not only in the Salento but in Greece as well.¹⁵¹ Περì Γενείων circulated widely because it traveled with the Τρία Συντάγματα, three longer discussions about disparities between Salentine Orthodox practices and Roman ones that I examine in Chapter 8. This leads me to conclude that Peter’s ostensibly central role was mainly symbolic: he could serve as a sign for all things “Western.” While Peter, with Paul, was highly regarded in the Orthodox world as koryphaios of the apostles,¹⁵² and a Byzantine imperial monastery dedicated to Saint Peter was established at Taranto, Peter had a special connection with Rome. The papal claim to primacy over other Christian sees dated to the Council of Chalcedon (451), when it was said that “Peter speaks through Leo” because of Pope Leo the Great’s argument for Roman primacy. That connection is implicit in the pairing of Peter and Leo in San Nicola at Mottola. The pope at the time of Περì Γενείων was either Honorius III (r. 1216–27) or Gregory IX (r. 1227–41); Gregory was the more aggressive, criticizing aspects of the Orthodox rite and insisting in 1231 that all “Greeks” needed to be rebaptized by Roman-rite clergy. It is possible that Nicholas-Nektarios was responding to a similar provocation with his Τρία Συντάγματα, although memories of 1204 were probably sufficient. These would have been vivid for Nicholas-Nektarios, who served as translator for the papal legate to Constantinople in 1214–15 and had traveled widely in the former Byzantine Empire.

The art-historical evidence underscores the discrepancy between individually produced texts and images that spoke mainly to an audience unfamiliar with contemporary texts. If we listened only to selected texts, we would conclude that the “Latins” shaved their heads and chins and that the “Greeks” did not.¹⁵³ If we look at the images, even though none can be specifically related to Nicholas-Nektarios or his copyists, we would expect a visual polemic of the sort that Weitzmann imagined to be played out on the faces of painted males and especially of Saint Peter. But this polemic is not present in paint.¹⁵⁴ As we shall see, this conclusion is not limited to images of Saint Peter.

Jewish Hair

That some monks sported a tonsure was evident to Italian Jews. Yet the Latin clerica (tonsure) took on a different meaning in the Roman Hebrew glossary, where clerica, ch(e)lerica refers not to the ring of hair but to a central tuft. Jews are urged not to shave the sides of the head and leave hair in the middle like the Christian “idolaters.”¹⁵⁵ If they were sensitive to others’ hair, we might well ask what kinds of hairstyles late medieval southern Italian Jews had. We lack firsthand pictorial information, given that there are no painted Jewish supplicants, and many (male) Jews depicted in Christian narrative scenes have their heads covered with a scarf. A royal edict of 1222 enjoined Jews not to cut their hair and to let their beards grow, so clearly some were doing the opposite.¹⁵⁶ In the Rhineland, too, rabbis ordered early thirteenth-century Jews not to wear their hair in the Christian fashion.¹⁵⁷ Despite the long-held prohibition on shaving with a razor (reiterated in the Rhenish legislation), no medieval Jews are shown with long side locks.¹⁵⁸ According to Shibolei ha-Leqet, one’s hair was not supposed to get too long; again, we have no objective definition of how long was too long. Even if one had consecutive periods of mourning, during which cutting the hair was discouraged, it was permissible to trim it with scissors.¹⁵⁹

Representations of Jewish hair do not differ significantly from those of all the other males shown in Salentine wall paintings across the medieval centuries. However, many more Jews are shown with a beard than clean-shaven, the latter being the preference—but not the rule—among other depicted males [Plates 1, 3]. Maimonides codified that a man who read the Torah in synagogue and represented the Jewish community should have a full beard (and a pleasant voice). Particularly pious Jews were supposed to have a beard, and in this way the beard might symbolize all Jewish men. Yet depictions of Jewish hair in Christian contexts are not consistent, not even in late medieval representations executed at a time of hardening attitudes and enforcement of laws about Jewish dress. When Saint Catherine disputes with a group of Jews at Santa Maria del Casale [28.sc.2], three are bearded but four are not, and when Christ dines in the house of the Pharisee in Lecce’s Torre di Belloluogo in the late fourteenth century, the pictorial host is unbearded.¹⁶⁰ The head covering, not the beard or hair itself, was a much more characteristic way of indicating a male Jew. It was a signifier of status that functioned much like female head coverings and was probably intended to suggest Jewish male effeminacy at the same time as it indicated their otherness.

Legislating Appearance

While recording contemporary realia was not the goal of Christian church painting, it is precisely in such ancillary details that an artist’s observations of the world around him, rather than mere imitation of iconographic models, come into play. The presence of iconographic details known to have been introduced at a certain historical moment removes the scenes in which they appear from the repetitive conventions of narrative imagery and makes it legitimate to read them as reflecting current local attitudes and realities. The depiction of Jews wearing a distinguishing emblem—the rotella—in two scenes of the martyrdom of Saint Stephen at Soleto [113.sc.1; Plate 14] provides a point of entry into an investigation of Christian attempts to legislate Jewish appearance and of Jewish clothing more generally.

Enforcing Jewish Difference

Legislation regarding Jewish clothing was intended to underscore Jewish identity and distinguish it from that of the surrounding dominant culture. This had already occurred by the ninth century in the Muslim world,¹⁶¹ and in 1215, canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that:

Whereas in certain provinces of the Church the difference in their clothes sets the Jews and Saracens apart from the Christians, in certain other lands there has arisen such confusion that no differences are noticeable. Thus it sometimes happens that by mistake Christians have intercourse with Jewish or Saracen women, and Jews or Saracens with Christian women. Therefore, lest these people, under the cover of an error, find an excuse for the grave sin of such intercourse, we decree that these people [Jews and Saracens] of either sex, and in all Christian lands, and at all times, shall easily be distinguishable from the rest of the populations by the character [qualitate] of their clothes; especially since such legislation is imposed upon them also by Moses.¹⁶²

No specific marks are prescribed to deter potential miscegenation, but only some unspecified distinction in clothing.

The degree to which the council’s injunctions were enforced varied widely across Europe, and it is not possible to discern any repercussions in the Salento. I would argue that a visible Jewish identity was not locally mandated until after 1400. This information is recorded a century later by a Franciscan monk, Roberto Caracciolo, who preached in Lecce in the 1490s and was largely responsible for the destruction of its giudecca and the transformation of its synagogue into a church (resulting in the reuse of its building materials in a toilet [56]). Jews were important in the economic life of Lecce in the fifteenth century; they were routinely called cives, citizens, and we know some of their names and have an inventory of one of their libraries.¹⁶³ Fra Roberto approvingly cited a law from the time of Maria d’Enghien, whose reign in Lecce in the late fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries marks the end of the period under consideration in this book. Recorded in volgare and thus intended to be understood and easily applied, it is worth quoting in full:

And for some errors that often occur, the said Majesty wants and commands: that all Jewish men or women from the age of six, whether foreigners or citizens of Lecce, the men must wear a red sign in the form of a round wheel [a rotella] on the chest over the breast the width of one palm in the form and size written by the court. And the women a round red sign over the chest and breast the width of one palm, wearing it over all the other clothes so that everyone is able to see, and indicate this is a Jew or Jewess, even if they go [out in public] wearing a cloak or a juppa or in a jupparello and a woman’s gonnella. And whoever does the contrary will pay the penalty of one ounce [of gold] for each offense. And if someone is so accused and does not have even a tari with which to pay the penalty he will be whipped around [throughout] Lecce.¹⁶⁴

The two images of Jews torturing Saint Stephen at Soleto [113.sc.1; Plate 14] suggest that these later, local injunctions were being enforced in the 1430s. Later fifteenth-century travelers’ accounts either fail to mention such distinguishing markers or note actively that there were none, so enforcement either waned in later decades or was sporadic and local.¹⁶⁵

There are no indications in pre-fifteenth-century wall paintings of a specific required element of dress to separate Jews from their neighbors. Yet there was some distinction previously, for the Lateran canon refers to self-imposed Jewish legislation going back to Moses and other sources refer to “Jewish clothing.”¹⁶⁶ In the previous chapters I cited midrashic texts that maintain that the Jews merited liberation from Egypt because they kept their Jewish names and Hebrew language (and also avoided slander and maintained chastity). In the Middle Ages, another reason for divine salvation was added: that the Jews did not alter their Jewish clothing. Already in the nineteenth century, Solomon Buber asserted that clothing was not part of the original midrash, but only recently have the medieval sources for this popular misquotation been traced. The earliest citation appears to be an eleventh-century text by Tobias ben Eliezer, a Byzantine anti-Karaite polemicist who lived in Kastoria, in northern Greece. In the thirteenth-fourteenth century it was being repeated by a Spanish Talmudist, and by the fifteenth century the midrash had mutated definitively to include names, language, clothing, and religion as reasons for Jewish liberation and signposts of Jewish identity.¹⁶⁷ We should ask, then, what the medieval commentators meant by “Jewish clothing” and why it was important to add dress to the earlier formulation.

“Jewish” Clothing

For Jews, clothing had always been significant. Several biblical books contain instructions about dress that were intended to sanctify male Jews’ external appearance and remind them of the mitzvot (the 613 commandments that pious Jews are supposed to observe). The prophet Zephaniah (Sophonias) declaimed against “all those who don foreign vestments,”¹⁶⁸ and the Babylonian Talmud states clearly that “The glory of God is man and the glory of man is his clothes.”¹⁶⁹ This statement did not refer to opulent, extravagant garments and finery of the sort to which later Jewish and Christian moralists would strenuously object. Rather, it referred to appropriate, decent, modest attire. Complaints preserved in the Cairo Genizah correspondence about being naked or having nothing to wear are concerns about the appropriateness of one’s clothing rather than its absence.¹⁷⁰ Respectable dress was the most immediate signifier of a respectable man: Jews who lacked decent footwear were instructed to sell their roof beams to get money to buy shoes or risk estrangement from heaven.¹⁷¹ Everyone who could afford it owned weekday wear, a change of clothes for nighttime, and another outfit for the Sabbath and festivals.¹⁷² That this requirement was in force in medieval Italy is clear from Shibolei ha-Leqet: those who lacked special Sabbath clothes were enjoined to rearrange their weekday garments in order to look and feel different on the Sabbath.¹⁷³ Moreover, clothing was to be kept clean; a scholar with a greasy spot on his garment ostensibly merited the death penalty,¹⁷⁴ although there is no evidence that this was ever carried out. The Jews in the Pilate scene at San Paolo in Brindisi are well dressed in a variety of colorful dyed garments [Plate 3].

Textual evidence for the particulars of Jewish male dress is limited and we should not assume that biblical or Talmudic injunctions were being practiced in medieval southern Italy. Yet if a garment or practice is included in the eleventh-century Otranto Mishnah glosses or the fourteenth-century Roman glossary on Maimonides, these garments or practices are likely to be contemporary. These vernacular glosses were added specifically to clarify terms for a contemporary local readership. Shibolei ha-Leqet is a more problematic source because it depends on earlier opinions as well as contemporary ones, but a careful sifting of context and language enables us to use this text as well. For the most part, these medieval Jewish sources confirm that Jews looked like their neighbors of comparable social status.

Shibolei ha-Leqet refers to a piltaro hat, made of felt, and to peacock feathers attached to hats worn outdoors on the Sabbath and secured with a strap under the neck so they won’t blow away. It also states that one may wear a “borita” or “bavarita,” even without such a strap.¹⁷⁵ This is the biretta widely worn by Italian men of style in the fourteenth century.¹⁷⁶ The Maimonidean glossary includes the term cappuçço, cappuççu, referring to a turban or head wrap in which one might wind phylacteries rather than the “hood” implied by the Italian homonym cappuccio; it states that women should take care not to wear such masculine ornaments as a turban or biretta (or, for that matter, a cuirass).¹⁷⁷ A pointed hood was supposed to be characteristic of respectable fourteenth-century men, but one source laments that even unworthies, including Jews, wear one.¹⁷⁸ Many Trecento laws reveal severe punishments for striking off a man’s hood. Clearly, well-to-do Jews wore a variety of hoods and other types of head coverings [Plate 3] and not just the white head scarves seen at San Cesario di Lecce [108.sc.1] and Acquarica del Capo [Plate 1].

Zidkiyahu Anav, the author of Shibolei ha-Leqet, records a practice he witnessed in Speyer that was unfamiliar to him in Rome: during prayer, men wrapped themselves in their tzitzit, shorthand for the fringed prayer shawl (tallit), during the fast day of Tisha b’Av.¹⁷⁹ Anav’s northern contemporary, Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, indicates in one of his responsa that this practice of wrapping was widespread among the Pietists, the so-called Hasidei Ashkenaz, who preserved many southern Italian (originally Palestinian) practices.¹⁸⁰ This statement, by an authority often cited in Shibolei ha-Leqet, clarifies the cappuçço glossed by Judah Romano as being used as a head covering, though not as a body wrap, in the thirteenth century. The practice of covering the head had fallen out of favor elsewhere but was still practiced by the Pietists. Anav also cites Rashi’s injunction that Jewish men cover the head every day, but he notes that in thirteenth-century Rome many Jews are not doing this because the “nations of the world” are laughing at them, and even some fellow Jews, “people of the house,” are laughing, and because of this they are laughing at themselves. He concludes, regretfully, that “our custom is to not cover the head.”¹⁸¹

The Talmud enjoins Jews to wear shoes, and clean ones at that; it also says that white shoelaces are required rather than the usual black.¹⁸² On Yom Kippur, leather footwear was entirely forbidden in order to afflict oneself as much as possible. King David allegedly walked barefoot on that day, but Talmudic rabbis accepted sandals made of cork, and one of Anav’s contemporaries, a Rabbi Shmuel of Bari, ruled that if there was danger from scorpion bites then even leather shoes were permissible.¹⁸³ The custom of walking barefoot on days of mourning, including funerals and Yom Kippur, would have made Salentine Jews stand out among their neighbors.

Gloves had symbolic value as indicators of authority; they were worn by high-ranking clergy and other notables [58.C]. Fourteenth-century terms for gloves included guanti, ciroteche (from the Greek), and mofele.184 Shibolei ha-Leqet confirms that medieval Jews also wore gloves and used the first term, rendered in Hebrew letters as , in the context of a discussion about accidentally carrying them on the Sabbath when carrying things in public is prohibited.¹⁸⁵ The author says, “I am inclined to be stricter,” requiring gloves to be sewn to other garments to preclude any mishaps. Judah Romano’s glossary includes additional terms that refer to fourteenth-century male fashions worn by Jews and non-Jews alike. For example, the cappa was a heavy cape or a bedcovering in which it was permissible to wrap oneself for protection from inclement Sabbath weather. Appennagli refers to pendant fringes; it was permitted to wrap oneself in a mantle bordered with fringe of the kind we see worn by Jewish men in San Paolo at Brindisi [26.sc.1; Plate 3].¹⁸⁶

In the tortures of Saint Stephen at Soleto with which we began this investigation, the figures wearing red rotellae (or rotae) in accord with Maria d’Enghien’s legislation are not otherwise clad or shod differently from others in the same fresco stratum [113.sc.1; Plate 14]. Nevertheless, an artist felt compelled to “update” these Jews in accordance with the actual appearance of local Jews following the early fifteenth-century edict. Prior to this time, “regular” Jews looked like their neighbors. Some of the more pious and learned Jews—perhaps the ones who wrote Hebrew chronicles and poetry and scientific works in the ninth to eleventh centuries, or those who made Jewish Bari and Otranto famous as far away as France in the twelfth century—probably did wear the type of white head covering often worn by depicted Jews [Plate 1]. This exceptional attribute of piety was then extended by Christian artists to representations of most Jews. The same process was responsible for the dominant image of Jews with beards.¹⁸⁷ Yet neither convention was consistently applied, and neither was the rule about wearing the rotella, as indicated by the diverse and unbranded group of Jews in the Brindisi scene of Pilate Washing His Hands [Plate 3].

Sumptuary Laws

Beginning in the early fifteenth century, several Jewish communities in northern Italy imposed sumptuary laws to combat public ostentation that might be interpreted by non-Jews as a claim of status and power. Initially these laws addressed excessive spending for weddings and funerals, but later they focused on clothing, with strict rules about women’s dress to be enforced by their husbands.¹⁸⁸ It is clear from these restrictions that Jewish social and juridical inferiority was not reflected in the way they dressed and adorned themselves.¹⁸⁹ However, we have no trace of Jewish sumptuary laws in the south of Italy. Because Jews looked like their neighbors, the Franciscans enjoined Maria d’Enghien to issue a law that distinguished them.

Sumptuary legislation was not only or even primarily for Jews. Limitations on the public display of finery and expensive clothing by Christians became more widespread beginning in the twelfth century with edicts issuing from both the church and secular authorities. The earliest such law in southern Italy dates to 1290, when Charles I of Anjou forbade men from wearing superfluous ornaments associated with women; a similar law was issued in 1308. According to the earlier legislation, no one could wear gilded shoes (calcareia deaurata) and only certain women were allowed fringes of pearls, gold, or silk. Doctors, jurists, and professional men could don garments of vair, but for burghers and merchants this fur was restricted to their hoods and hats (caputio and birreta). No woman could wear more than seven buttons, nor could their value exceed twenty-two tari, and pearl garlands adorned with gems and gold were permitted only if they were less than two fingers wide.¹⁹⁰

This corporate regulation of bodies privileged certain social groups while restricting others, with the aim of limiting competition within the highest social classes and imposing an ideal social order that distinguished classes and genders.¹⁹¹ Alan Hunt’s study of sumptuary legislation found that while more medieval legislation was directed toward men, enforcement of the laws was more rigorous toward women.¹⁹² We can assume, I think, that supplicants represented on Salento church walls were not violating any legislation then in force. The fur-trimmed dress of so many painted individuals at Santa Maria del Casale supports the conclusion that these individuals belonged to the uppermost social class, while a similarly consistent but certainly different social group seems to be represented in Santi Stefani at Vaste. Whether it is viewed as a form of individual or corporate communication, appearance is among the most public manifestations of economic and social power.¹⁹³ All the evidence indicates that status, not faith, determined both actual dress and its representations, and it is to these and other aspects of status that we turn next.