Peter’s physical traits are described in accounts written by Epiphanius of Salamis, John Malalas, Elpius the Roman, and others: an older man with gray or white hair and a short beard.148 Despite this general consensus Peter’s specific iconography and attributes varied, which made him a rather unusual case in Byzantine art. This mutability was noted by Kurt Weitzmann in his study of the thirteenth-century Saint Peter icon at Dumbarton Oaks; moreover, he argued that Peter’s iconography in Byzantium after 1054 deliberately responded to political and religious differences between the (so-called) East and West and that the Byzantines deliberately avoided depicting Peter in the roll-type hairstyle associated with Rome.149 However, a survey of Petrine images challenges Weitzmann’s hypothesis. Within the general iconographic parameters there was great variety in the Byzantine world and significant variety even in Rome itself.150 In the Salento, Peter is seldom represented the same way twice. With a full head of overlapping fish-scale hair, he is paired with a tonsured Pope Leo in the eleventh-century San Nicola at Mottola, probably repainted in the thirteenth century [76.st.1]. In the same church, Peter is also shown with a smooth heart-shaped hairline, and a third time with tight corkscrew curls falling from a central point. None of the Salento supplicants looks remotely like him in any of these depictions; in fact, none of them is shown as elderly. The fact that Peter is depicted with numerous hairstyle variations reflects in a general way the variety that no doubt characterized real men’s hair, but in no case does a painted supplicant share specific features of Petrine representation.
How then should we understand the focus on Saint Peter and the sudden appeal of such a treatise in the thirteenth century? It was certainly part of a larger discourse in the period after 1204 when Byzantine and Orthodox identity were under pressure, resulting in an increased production of texts and images not only in the Salento but in Greece as well.151 Περì Γενείων circulated widely because it traveled with the Τρία Συντάγματα, three longer discussions about disparities between Salentine Orthodox practices and Roman ones that I examine in Chapter 8. This leads me to conclude that Peter’s ostensibly central role was mainly symbolic: he could serve as a sign for all things “Western.” While Peter, with Paul, was highly regarded in the Orthodox world as koryphaios of the apostles,152 and a Byzantine imperial monastery dedicated to Saint Peter was established at Taranto, Peter had a special connection with Rome. The papal claim to primacy over other Christian sees dated to the Council of Chalcedon (451), when it was said that “Peter speaks through Leo” because of Pope Leo the Great’s argument for Roman primacy. That connection is implicit in the pairing of Peter and Leo in San Nicola at Mottola. The pope at the time of Περì Γενείων was either Honorius III (r. 1216–27) or Gregory IX (r. 1227–41); Gregory was the more aggressive, criticizing aspects of the Orthodox rite and insisting in 1231 that all “Greeks” needed to be rebaptized by Roman-rite clergy. It is possible that Nicholas-Nektarios was responding to a similar provocation with his Τρία Συντάγματα, although memories of 1204 were probably sufficient. These would have been vivid for Nicholas-Nektarios, who served as translator for the papal legate to Constantinople in 1214–15 and had traveled widely in the former Byzantine Empire.
The art-historical evidence underscores the discrepancy between individually produced texts and images that spoke mainly to an audience unfamiliar with contemporary texts. If we listened only to selected texts, we would conclude that the “Latins” shaved their heads and chins and that the “Greeks” did not.153 If we look at the images, even though none can be specifically related to Nicholas-Nektarios or his copyists, we would expect a visual polemic of the sort that Weitzmann imagined to be played out on the faces of painted males and especially of Saint Peter. But this polemic is not present in paint.154 As we shall see, this conclusion is not limited to images of Saint Peter.
Jewish Hair
That some monks sported a tonsure was evident to Italian Jews. Yet the Latin clerica (tonsure) took on a different meaning in the Roman Hebrew glossary, where clerica, ch(e)lerica refers not to the ring of hair but to a central tuft. Jews are urged not to shave the sides of the head and leave hair in the middle like the Christian “idolaters.”155 If they were sensitive to others’ hair, we might well ask what kinds of hairstyles late medieval southern Italian Jews had. We lack firsthand pictorial information, given that there are no painted Jewish supplicants, and many (male) Jews depicted in Christian narrative scenes have their heads covered with a scarf. A royal edict of 1222 enjoined Jews not to cut their hair and to let their beards grow, so clearly some were doing the opposite.156 In the Rhineland, too, rabbis ordered early thirteenth-century Jews not to wear their hair in the Christian fashion.157 Despite the long-held prohibition on shaving with a razor (reiterated in the Rhenish legislation), no medieval Jews are shown with long side locks.158 According to Shibolei ha-Leqet, one’s hair was not supposed to get too long; again, we have no objective definition of how long was too long. Even if one had consecutive periods of mourning, during which cutting the hair was discouraged, it was permissible to trim it with scissors.159
Representations of Jewish hair do not differ significantly from those of all the other males shown in Salentine wall paintings across the medieval centuries. However, many more Jews are shown with a beard than clean-shaven, the latter being the preference—but not the rule—among other depicted males [Plates 1, 3]. Maimonides codified that a man who read the Torah in synagogue and represented the Jewish community should have a full beard (and a pleasant voice). Particularly pious Jews were supposed to have a beard, and in this way the beard might symbolize all Jewish men. Yet depictions of Jewish hair in Christian contexts are not consistent, not even in late medieval representations executed at a time of hardening attitudes and enforcement of laws about Jewish dress. When Saint Catherine disputes with a group of Jews at Santa Maria del Casale [28.sc.2], three are bearded but four are not, and when Christ dines in the house of the Pharisee in Lecce’s Torre di Belloluogo in the late fourteenth century, the pictorial host is unbearded.160 The head covering, not the beard or hair itself, was a much more characteristic way of indicating a male Jew. It was a signifier of status that functioned much like female head coverings and was probably intended to suggest Jewish male effeminacy at the same time as it indicated their otherness.
Legislating Appearance
While recording contemporary realia was not the goal of Christian church painting, it is precisely in such ancillary details that an artist’s observations of the world around him, rather than mere imitation of iconographic models, come into play. The presence of iconographic details known to have been introduced at a certain historical moment removes the scenes in which they appear from the repetitive conventions of narrative imagery and makes it legitimate to read them as reflecting current local attitudes and realities. The depiction of Jews wearing a distinguishing emblem—the rotella—in two scenes of the martyrdom of Saint Stephen at Soleto [113.sc.1; Plate 14] provides a point of entry into an investigation of Christian attempts to legislate Jewish appearance and of Jewish clothing more generally.
Enforcing Jewish Difference
Legislation regarding Jewish clothing was intended to underscore Jewish identity and distinguish it from that of the surrounding dominant culture. This had already occurred by the ninth century in the Muslim world,161 and in 1215, canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that:
Whereas in certain provinces of the Church the difference in their clothes sets the Jews and Saracens apart from the Christians, in certain other lands there has arisen such confusion that no differences are noticeable. Thus it sometimes happens that by mistake Christians have intercourse with Jewish or Saracen women, and Jews or Saracens with Christian women. Therefore, lest these people, under the cover of an error, find an excuse for the grave sin of