The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran
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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 mid-thirteenth century on they paid the archbishop of Taranto a handsome sum for the privilege.38 However, there is no indication that Jews were restricted to this particular livelihood or that non-Jews could not participate in textile production outside the city of Taranto. The fulling mills at Racale and Ostuni were not associated with Jews.39 It is likely that Jews were active in the dyeing industries at Otranto, Oria, and other cities in southern Italy, as was the case around the Mediterranean.40
We possess written sources that have not been used previously to confirm the archaeological and historical evidence for cloth manufacturing in medieval southern Italy. Glosses in the Salentine dialect found in the margins of the eleventh-century Mishnah manuscript now in Parma clarify many of the terms found in the Hebrew text related to the production and sale of cloth. In these marginalia are such terms as kui karmena, he who dyes wool its most common color, red; raiiu, from Latin radius, the weaver’s spindle; savani, from the Greek σάβανον, sabanon, a thick linen cloth.41 The uniquely Jewish prohibition against mixing together fabrics obtained from animals and plants, specifically wool and linen (sha’atnez), is reiterated in these glosses with the injunction to weave each fabric on its own loom to avoid any accidental mixing42 and the warning that one who weaves or wears “impure” fabrics will bring upon himself the wrath of God.43 The local Christians’ tendency to combine different fibers may lie behind the Salentine Jews’ concerns in this regard.44 The medieval glossator cites the Palestinian rather than the Babylonian Talmud, which is important evidence for the continued use of that source in southern Italy in the eleventh century.
Judah Romano’s glossary, another heretofore unused source, also sheds light on fourteenth-century Italian textiles and practices. For the entry cuffia, coife, referring to a hair covering, Judah notes that one is permitted on the Sabbath to transport a quantity of nuts or pomegranate peels or skins, or indigo or madder or other colors, sufficient to color a small garment such as a girl’s bonnet.45 These materials for dyeing were thus known and available in fourteenth-century Italy.
The most common dyestuffs in medieval Europe were vegetal: woad, from which indigo was derived and which did not require a mordant to make the color adhere, and madder, which yielded red.46 According to a Jewish midrash, the madder plant is called
In the fifteenth century, some Jews were distinguished by color appliqués: the red rotella is visible in two narrative scenes at Soleto [113.sc.1; Plate 14],53 and it may have been the clothing of Jews in late medieval Gallipoli that inspired the local name of a fish, the sciudeo (literally, “Jew-fish”), distinguished by its red and yellow stripes.54 Red and yellow stripes are worn by servants—horse grooms—at Santa Maria del Casale near Brindisi [28.H, V; Plate 7]. The two colors are juxtaposed but not striped on the ceiling at Li Monaci [Plate 9] and on the walls and ceiling at Ugento [151.B, C, st.1], all datable to the early fourteenth century.55
The poor wore undyed fabrics, and we see two of them, dressed in grayish tones, holding candles in the crypt church of San Nicola at Mottola [76.E; Plate 13]. Yet these are not the individuals who are most often shown in small village churches. Modest as they or their contributions may have been, these supplicant figures usually wear dyed garments that would have communicated a more elevated social identity to contemporary viewers. I do not suggest that this identity was real, or that people actually wore the specific garments shown; more likely these garments are stylistic syntheses, idealizations effected by artists eager to please and open to inspiration from varied sources. I agree with those historians of dress who argue that in commemorative images of people, unlike narrative religious images, artists did not simply work from a prototype, but there is a high degree of sameness among