The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran

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