The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ