The Art of the Shoe. Marie-Josèphe Bossan
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of Greek models.
In ancient Rome, shoes were indicators of social status and wealth. Some patricians wore shoes with soles of silver or solid gold, while plebeians were content to wear clogs or rustic footwear with wooden soles. Slaves lacked the right to wear shoes and walked barefoot, their feet covered in chalk or plaster. When high-ranking Roman citizens were invited to a feast, they had someone carry their sandals at the home of their host. The less fortunate had to carry their own shoes, because it was considered rude to keep ones walking shoes on. As a bed was used for dining in Rome, shoes were removed before the meal and put back on when leaving the table.
Roman shoes fall into two categories: the solea, a form of sandal, and the calceus, a closed toe shoe worn with a toga. Other types evolved with variation in colour, form, and construction. Magistrates wore strange-looking shoes with curved toes made out of black or white leather and decorated on the side with a gold or silver crescent. As in Egypt and Greece, the difference between the left and right foot was well differentiated. Shoemakers were citizens who worked in shops, rather than slaves. This is a crucial distinction in understanding the status of the shoe as an object.
In ancient Rome, the shoe began to acquire much importance in the military arena. The caliga, the Roman soldier’s shoe, was a type of sandal. Strapped to the foot, it had a thick leather sole with pointed studs. It was up to the soldiers to acquire the studs; under certain circumstances, however, they were distributed free of charge as part of a ceremony called the clavarium.
It is said that as a child the Emperor Caligula was so fond of wearing the caliga he was named after the shoe, a delightful and telling anecdote. The mulleus, a closed shoe that was red in colour, differed little from the calceus. Worn by emperors, magistrates, and the children of senators, it got its name from the seashell from which bright crimson was extracted. The campagus took the form of a boot that exposed the foot. Trimmed in fur, and often decorated with pearls and precious stones, it was intended for generals to wear. A crimson version was exclusively reserved for emperors.
As in ancient Greece, the sandal and the slipper were mainly intended for women to wear indoors. The soccus, a type of slipper with a raised tip and identical for both feet, was apparently of Persian origin; it would become a traditional shoe in Turkey. These delicate little shoes aroused the concupiscence of the era’s fetishists.
18. Low-relief of the Trajan column, soldiers of the Roman legions (military shoes). Rome, 113 AD. Marble.
Suetonus (70–128) tells how the Roman senator Lucius Vitellus, who carried under his tunic the slipper that his mistress wore on her right foot, without the slightest embarrassment, would remove the shoe in public and cover it with kisses. Red shoes had long been the privileged attribute of Roman courtesans before all women dared to wear them.
After the emperor Aurelius (212–275) wore them, red shoes became an Imperial symbol, giving birth to a tradition that was later taken up by the Papacy, and subsequently by all the courts of Europe, which wore red-heeled shoes.
We know from the writings of Juvenal (55–140) that to give a spanking with a shoe was a serious punishment commonly administered to children and slaves.
Romantic Romans put their shoes to more gallant use by inserting amorous messages between the sandal and the foot of their confidant. In this way, sandals became a drop box for love notes as advocated by Ovid (43 BC-17 AD) in The Art of Love.
19. Colossal statue of the god Mars (shod in campagus). 1st century AD. Capitole Museum, Rome.
20. Funerary stele of a cobbler. Reims, Marne, faubourg Cérès, Gallo-Roman, 2nd century AD. Collection of the Saint-Rémi Museum of Reims. Photo by Robert Meulle.
21. Sliver sandal. Byzantine period. Bally Museum, Schönenwerd, Switzerland.
The Gallo-Romans
The Gallo-Romans wore various versions of flat shoes with rounded toes. The most popular were ordinary sandals for men and women based on Roman models.
The gallica was a closed shoe with a wooden sole and was the ancestor of the galoshes (a later overshoe with a wooden sole).
An 11th-century monument to a shoemaker confirms the existence of the shoemaker’s industry and the respect these artisans enjoyed.
22. Mosaics from the churches of Saint Vital and Saint Apollinaire in Classe de Ravenne. Around 547 AD. The Emperor Justinien and his servents.
The Byzantine empire
Byzantine civilization extended from the 5th to the 15th century, producing throughout this period a wealth of crimson leather shoes trimmed in gold reminiscent of embroidered Persian-style boots, as well as the Roman soccus and mulleus.
Byzantine mules and slippers were objects of luxury and refinement initially reserved for the Emperor and his court. Crimson or gold slippers were worn in the eastern Mediterranean basin, in particular in the area around Alexandria and in the Nile valley. Excavations at Achmin have yielded many examples that belonged to women. The arrival of Christian shoemakers in this region revived the craft of shoemaking, as Christian symbols were added to the geometric decorative tradition. A silver sandal discovered in an Egyptian tomb and now in the collection of the Bally Museum is a good example. Dating to the 6th century AD, it is embellished with the image of a dove symbolizing Christ.
23. Stained-glass window of the baptism of Clovis by Saint-Rémy (496). Sanctuary of Saint Bonaventure, Lyon 2nd, by L. Charat and Mrs. Lamy-Paillet in 1964. Photo by J. Bonnet, Imp. Beaulieu Lyon.
24. Saint Mark Healing Aniane the Cobbler, detail from a mosaic. 13th century. Saint Mark Basilica, Venice.
The Middle Ages
As the Middle Ages dawned in the West, footwear remained under the influence of ancient Roman models. The Francs wore shoes equipped with straps that rose to mid-thigh. Only their leaders wore shoes with pointed tips.
Thanks to the extraordinary degree of preservation of certain burials, we have an idea of what Merovingian shoes looked like. The tomb discovered at Saint-Denis of Queen Arégonde, wife of King Clotaire I (497–561), has enabled us to reconstruct an image of her shoes as supple leather sandals with straps intertwining the leg. Elsewhere, gilded bronze shoe buckles decorated with stylized animals discovered in a leader’s tomb at Hordaim, are proof of the attention given to shoe ornamentation during this period. Shoes were very costly during the Middle Ages, which is why they appear in wills and are among the donations made to monasteries. Costliness also explains why a fiancé would offer his future wife a pair of embroidered shoes before marriage, a lovely tradition dating to Gregory of Tours (538–594). We can get a sense of the opulence of this gift from the shoes of this era preserved in the museum of Chelles near Paris.
The strapped or banded shoe continued into the Carolingian period, although the woman’s model became more embellished. As for the wooden-soled gallique or galoche, it too remained in use.
From this time forward, soldiers protected their legs with leather or metal leggings called bamberges. In the 9th-century, a shoe called the heuse made out of supple leather extending high on the leg announced the arrival of the boot.
We known from the monk of the Saint Gall monastery that emperor Charlemagne wore simple boots with straps intertwining the legs, although for ceremonies he wore laced boots decorated with precious stones. But frequent contact between France and Italy helped develop a taste for regalia and increasingly the shoe became an object of great luxury.
At the same time, religious councils were ordering clerics to wear liturgical shoes while performing mass. Called