The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran
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for it depicts in high relief a deceased man being lifted aloft by flanking angels. Either identifying information was painted alongside and is now lost or the sarcophagus was originally placed in a family chapel such that the occupant’s identification was apparent.
The carved multilevel cenotaph of Raimondello del Balzo Orsini (d. 1406) in the church he founded at Galatina is unique in this region and period [47.C]. Brightly painted and gilded, its form echoed that of such royal Neapolitan tombs as that of King Robert the Wise in Santa Chiara and it served as a model for the funerary monument of Raimondello’s son, Giovanni Antonio del Balzo Orsini, installed in the newly enlarged sanctuary at Galatina in the 1460s.63 Such an elaborate tomb marker, complete with coat of arms, marks the honoree as one of the most exalted dead.
At Quattro Macine, the small Byzantine church of the tenth or eleventh century contained a single tomb before the altar, housing a male aged thirty to thirty-five [102].64 While it seemed likely that this burial was the raison d’être for the church even though such a location for a tomb was unprecedented in Byzantine churches,65 carbon-14 dating indicates that the man was actually interred during the thirteenth or fourteenth century.66 Whatever the date, his was certainly a privileged burial. This was also the case for the seven graves inside the late medieval church (San Nicola?) at Apigliano, where infants’ tombs are arrayed nearest the altar and adults farther away. The centralized adult tomb (XXXVI), with three skeletons, is the only one anywhere at Apigliano constructed with squared limestone blocks, another indicator of the occupants’ social status.67
Although the identity of a single person buried inside a church might not be forgotten quickly, the graves of individuals and families buried outdoors almost certainly required the presence of identifying markers. Carved tombstones, often with decoration on two or more sides, identify the deceased of all three religious and linguistic groups in the Salento. In every case, a formally carved stone must have been a veritable status billboard. Even with its Greek text written in hard-to-read minuscule, the stone that marked the grave of Nicholas, son of Vitalius Ferriaci, in 1330 would have been a credit to the family, attracting viewers’ eyes to both sides with their reliefs, compass-drawn rosettes, and alternating colors [156.A]. This marker contrasts significantly with a roughly contemporary gravestone from San Cataldo [107], which, while much larger, lacks relief or inlay and is carved on one side only with irregularly sized and poorly spaced letters. Nevertheless, the sheer size of this less-well-carved marker surely was meant to impress. The same must have been true for Jewish tombstones: some are extremely large [16, 135]; one has text emphasized in red [16] and with shofars and menorahs incised on sides and front; others have Latin and Hebrew texts on two sides and incised menorahs and shofars on the others.
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