CHAPTER 3
Appearance
It is often said that “clothes make the man,” and appearance is indeed the most obvious signal of identity.1 Before names are exchanged and languages employed in spoken discourse, impressions have already been formed on the basis of appearance.2 Instinctively, and not always correctly, we interpret such cues as physiognomy, dress, and jewelry in order to categorize and judge others according to gender, status, and even religious or cultural or ethnic affiliation. The elements of appearance thus communicate social identities in a nonverbal manner.3 Yet because the meanings and relative importance of the components of appearance vary according to context, messages sent by the wearer of a certain costume may not be perceived, or even received, by his or her viewers. The people we meet have likely conferred upon us a social identity based entirely on appearance without our even being aware of it.
How can we apprehend the appearance of medieval Salentine men, women, and children who belonged to a range of social, religious, and cultural groups? First, we can examine both skeletal remains and artifacts retrieved from tombs. Physical remains tell us something about the size and health of these people, and grave goods provide evidence for contemporary dress and ornament. Second, painted representations of individuals, often called “donor portraits,”4 are especially valuable; even if they do not report what the supplicant really looked like or what he or she actually wore, the depictions are at least related to patrons’ and viewers’ aspirations and expectations about appearance. Third, certain realistic details in the religious imagery so prominent in South Italian medieval art may also reveal contemporary practices in clothing, hairstyle, and adornment; convincing work has been done on the interpretation of such “realia” in Byzantine religious art.5 Finally, textual sources sometimes convey information about the ways in which the various elements of appearance communicated meaning in their own time. In this chapter, I analyze archaeological, artistic, and textual sources to uncover the most significant components of appearance: physiognomy, dress, jewelry, and hairstyle.
Physiognomy
Skeletal material from medieval southern Italy is limited but still informative about stature and diseases that might affect appearance. Tenth- and eleventh-century skeletal remains from the medieval village of Quattro Macine provided a male adult specimen approximately 1.672 meters (5.48 feet) tall and a female 1.515 meters (4.97 feet) tall (from tomb XI, [102]).6 Here and at the nearby excavated medieval village of Apigliano, the deceased are aptly described as “smallish” in stature.7 Many individuals suffered from joint ailments, particularly osteoarthritis,8 and even children were susceptible to the dental decay that caused adults to lose most of their teeth before death.9 Three infant burials at Quattro Macine show a malformation of the growing ends of the long bones, a visible genetic defect.10 The curved femurs of an early medieval male buried at San Pietro Mandurino may indicate an equestrian profession,11 though they would seldom be visible under his clothing.
To a limited degree, biological characteristics helped constitute individual and group identities.12 This is particularly clear in the case of slaves. Even though the most detailed information about slavery in medieval Italy comes from northern cities, there is no doubt that slavery was a part of southern Italian urban life as well. There are records of purchases and manumissions in twelfth-century Bari and thirteenth-century Lucera;13 in the Salento, a slave in Gallipoli was donated, along with his sons and property, to the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria at Nardò in 1115.14 However, prior to the early thirteenth century skin color is rarely used as a descriptive adjective for slaves.15 A female slave purchased by a Jewish resident of Taranto in 1482 is identified as having black skin, but also, and equally, she is said to be unbaptized, of good health, and named Catherine.16 Assigning color was, in any case, a highly subjective process: “Tartar” slaves brought to Florence from the north shore of the Black Sea might be described as black, brown, olive, fair, reddish, or white.17 Faces were far more important than color, as they were believed to communicate aspects of character and elements of distinctive individuality that would be most useful in identifying a slave who ran away.18 Hence eye shapes and colors were often noted in slave transactions, as were body piercings (mostly ears, though one Greek female had a pierced nose), whereas such mutable traits as hair color and hairstyle were omitted. Unlike skin color, nose shape could serve as a proxy for ethnic labeling: Tartars all had flat, snub noses even though they came in six colors.19 An ancient Jewish midrashic compilation says there can be no legal identification of a man without identification of his nose, the most important feature of his face.20 It is worth noting that all the religious groups in the Salento believed that things seen by a woman during her pregnancy would affect the appearance of her child.21
If we turn to images of human supplicants to assess the physiological and immutable features of appearance—stature, skin color, facial features—we find some correspondence with the archaeological record. When the painted figures are paired, presumably husband and wife, the male is shown noticeably taller, which accords with the skeletal evidence. Two examples are the parents, Antony and Doulitzia, in the apse at Vaste [157.A], and the anonymous embracing couple on the ceiling at Li Monaci [Plate 9]. The size disparity is even greater at the Candelora crypt in Massafra, where a kneeling male figure adjacent to Mary in the scene of Jesus going to school is the same height as the standing female behind him [63.A; Plate 12]. Almost all depicted supplicants are very small compared to the holy figures they venerate—Santa Maria del Casale near Brindisi [Plate 5] contains notable exceptions—but this is clearly symbolic.
Depictions of nonwhite skin are limited to nonhumans: the devilish personifications of the Jordan River in scenes of Christ’s baptism at Otranto and San Mauro near Gallipoli are black, as is the enormous stucco-relief Satan in the Last Judgment at Soleto [113.B] and the tiny demons there and in the same scene at Santa Maria del Casale [28.A]. The angels who guard the access to Paradise in Soleto are red. No depicted supplicant or servant is black or brown, but what I am calling “white” might well have been termed “olive” or “reddish” or “fair” by medieval viewers (and slave owners). Different kinds of noses are shown, sometimes in the same monument, but it seems very unlikely that a snub nose, like that found on many of the painted figures at San Vito dei Normanni [109], is anything other than an artist’s unconscious stylistic fingerprint.
Clothing
More than stature, skin color, and even facial features, clothing was critical to the construction and perception of individual and group identities in the Middle Ages. Yet the homogeneity of depicted fashions at any given date—regardless of the language of accompanying inscriptions or material evidence for local worship or textual information about the local community—indicates that clothing alone is not an adequate indicator of cultural identity. It could reveal or conceal the wearer’s gender, age, profession,