The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran
garments.74 Flat and spherical buttons are known from excavations at Otranto and elsewhere.75
Very similar figures are associated with monuments containing Latin inscriptions. At least four of the fourteenth-century supplicants at Santa Maria del Casale are shown kneeling in plain, tight-sleeved red tunics [28; Plate 5], as is a single figure at Grottaglie’s Cripta delle Nicchie who also has something suspended from his belt [53.D]. Others at Santa Maria del Casale wear more elaborate clothing, with tight buttoned sleeves emerging from a red hooded mantle with elbow-length sleeves; both the sleeves and the hood are lined with fur, either white or the distinctive black-and-white vair [28.I, N, O; Plates 5–6].76 (A very similar figure, in red trimmed with vair, is poorly preserved at San Paolo in Brindisi [26.F].) Below a devotional text dated 1335, Nicholas de Marra adores the Virgin and Child in a red tight-sleeved tunic topped by a short cape trimmed with fur [Plate 7]. The four kneeling figures behind him wear two-toned garments of pink and green;77 one has a short red cape or hood. None of the kneeling males in this church wear the radically different fashions that would be introduced around mid-century, although the two grooms/standard-bearers here do have extraordinary tall hats [28.V].
At other sites with a preponderance of Latin texts, supplicants are dressed in garments of different colors. At the Candelora crypt in Massafra (thirteenth century), a male kneeling beside Saint Stephen is dressed in a tight-sleeved white tunic and red hose with soles attached [63.B].78 Nearby, the male half of the couple in the scene of Christ going to school wears a short blue-gray garment that opens in front over a darker-gray tunic [63.A; Plate 12]. At Masseria Lo Noce near Grottaglie (fourteenth century) the kneeling Daniel is dressed in dark blue; a bulge indicates a traveling hat perched on his back [54.A]. At San Giorgio di Rocca-pampina, the supplicant Calogerius sports a white tunic with red trim at the wrists under a long-sleeved light-blue garment, a iuppa (γιούππα) that has triangular gores inserted or is slashed at the front and sides to reveal both its red lining and the tunic underneath [92.B]. Red hose or shoes complete the outfit. And at Santa Maria di Cerrate, a kneeling fourteenth-century supplicant accompanied by the church’s sole Latin inscription witnesses the Koimesis in a blue-green tunic under a tight-sleeved white robe lined in red [114.F–G; Plate 15].
Dramatic changes in male attire attested elsewhere in Italy in the mid-fourteenth century penetrated the Salento some decades later. Inspired by French fashions introduced at the Angevin court in Naples during the 1330s and seen in the following years in Rome, Florence, and Milan, fashionable men began to eschew the long tunic in favor of a knee-length, belted woolen gonnella over a short padded jacket, the farsetto or jupparellu (so called in Naples in 1314); this was attached to stockings now visible to the upper thigh and attached by laces to the new shorter breeches.79 By midcentury the gonnella was so tight that laces and buttons were required to put it on, and in the 1360s–70s the gonnella was made to adhere not only to the chest but also to the flanks, with these areas 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].