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]:
