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
