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
