A curious painted panel at Santa Maria del Casale [28.J, L] may postdate the badly abraded frescoes it covers (I was not able to examine the stratigraphy up close). It is certainly medieval. The left part of this “triptych” has a red helmet with white crest balanced on a white shield with diagonal red cross.31 The faint letters below, “IOHS.… / RODI,” refer to the order of Saint John of Jerusalem and Rhodes, to whom all the Templar possessions passed within a few years after the formal process against them took place in 1310, quite likely in Santa Maria del Casale itself.32 It is tempting to read in this panel a commemoration of the local event and a visual assertion of Hospitaller status vis-à-vis the Templars. The adjacent panel is more elaborate: a diagonally balanced shield at the base, decorated with three smaller shields, supports a red mantle, a helmet with visor, a crown with a golden Gothic m on top, and two large black-and-white crests. The right-hand panel has a black shield with gold cross supporting a more elaborate black helmet with a visor and what may be a griffon crest. To the right is yet another shield, this time gold with three rampant red lions, on which are balanced a vair-lined red mantle, two crests (unless these are elaborations of the cape), and a large golden n. The fur-lined mantles and the crowns are royal or princely emblems,33 and the diagonal shield that supports additional insignia is the typical representation of the complete armorial image in medieval heraldic rolls. Similarly elaborate crests, one with an animal head, are worn by supplicants elsewhere on the same wall [28.D].
While I cannot fully unpack these impressive icons of power, I am confident that they were once readable by those visitors to Brindisi who possessed the heraldic code, including all of the high-ranking patrons of the church’s other painted images. Moreover, I would liken these heraldic images to painted or carved texts: their very presence was impressive even to those who could not “read” them, enhancing the status of the entire church. As Detlev Kraack has discussed, noblemen and members of chivalric or fraternal orders proudly demonstrated their presence at important sites—and even at less-important sites en route to those destinations—by means of permanent and ephemeral displays of insignia.34 These “signs of honor” were important records of passage and of social relations. The insignia at Santa Maria del Casale record the presence of mutually supportive noblemen of equal rank.
A second corpus of heraldic material consists not of formally carved or painted shields but of more numerous small-scale examples, either quickly sketched onto or, far more often, incised into a plastered wall [e.g., 1.pg, 3.pg, 54.pg, 78.pg].35 The evidence of subsequent incision provides a terminus ante quem for the frescoes, but it is not easy to assign dates because heraldry remained important long after the early fifteenth century. I think that all the small markers of status—or wannabe status—in the Database are from the late Middle Ages or early modern era.36 In those cases where pictorial graffiti are in close proximity to verbal graffiti, the morphology of the latter can be compared with securely dated examples, such as the graffito of an archpriest at Nociglia of 1472 [80.B]). Such details as the preference for minuscule betrays a late date in Greek graffiti, while classicizing capitals, stylized script, and classical names indicate a postmedieval date for Latin graffiti. Assessing the age of undated graffiti, especially pictorial graffiti, is a risky question of connoisseurship.
A bigger question for the purposes of this chapter is whether all of these graffitists could actually have had a blazon indicating their family status. By the thirteenth century even those who were not of noble birth were permitted coats of arms, a usage formalized in northern Italy in the next century: according to Bartolo di Sassoferrato, so long as one did not falsely claim a title or damage the property or reputation of others, inventing a coat of arms was permissible.37 Therefore, in some cases a painted or incised stemma indicated an aristocratic presence, however that “presence” is defined, while in other cases these might be harmless inventions. I suggest that isolated shield graffiti are expressions of desired rather than real status, whereas groupings of heraldic insignia are likely to be genuine symbolic communications of at least relative social status. This finds some confirmation in the isolated shield incised into a tombstone in Trani that presumably postdates the Hebrew inscription dated 1290/91 [149]. The “owner” of the shield could have been a descendant of the person named on the stone, or indeed any person with access to the tomb, although the fact that bones were found undisturbed may indicate that the graffitist was Jewish.38
At Masseria Lo Noce, graffiti are clustered exclusively on the archangel Michael who guards an arcosolium tomb on the right wall [54.st; Plate 10]. A large, partly cross-hatched shield occupies the space below the angel’s left arm and his spear; at the lower-left corner, over and around his legs, are three more shields, all bearing different designs. Their presence on the crypt’s sole figure in military pose is clearly quite deliberate and it is tempting to see the careful distinctions among the shields as similarly meaningful. Their “realism” is reinforced by the incision of fictive loops for “hanging” the graffiti shields. But could the different decorations actually be products of creative invention rather than memory? Were the owners of these shields themselves present to insert their mark on Saint Michael, or were they done by members of the household or even by persons more removed from legitimate heraldry? At the moment these questions are unanswerable.
Another assemblage of individualized shields, in this case more deliberately painted, is found in the second fresco layer on a pilaster at Alezio’s Santa Maria della Lizza [Plate 2]. Here an impression of hierarchy is palpable: two of the shields are significantly larger than the others, prominently “hanging” on painted hooks in the top row. These large shields, like several of the smaller ones, are rendered in more than one color, and both are further associated with a figural outline near the apex: a profiled male head for the left shield and a profiled bird for the right. These profiles are probably additional heraldic elements (crests?). The network of smaller shields at Alezio asserted to medieval viewers that the holders of the large shields had numerous followers or supporters. Unfortunately, I have not been able to identify any of these individuals.
The presence of white shields with black crosses on the ceiling of the Cripta del Crocefisso at Ugento [151.D] has spurred several studies arguing that they signify patronage by the Teutonic Order, which has ample attestation in the Salento.39 On the other hand, there are also white shields with red crosses, suggesting to one scholar patronage by the Templars, who are entirely unattested in the region.40 The latest scholar to weigh in on the matter, Hubert Houben, does think this was a Teutonic church, originally Santa Maria dei Teutonici, known from fifteenth-century texts; he considers the red-crossed shields either a matter of artistic license or an “homage” to the Templars on the part of the Teutonic Order.41 I am not convinced that this ceiling decoration is informative about individual or group patronage, just as I do not think the embracing couple at Li Monaci [43.C] represents people named in the dedicatory inscription. Ceilings, which could barely be seen in the dark and smoky interior of a crypt church, were not the place to make personal statements even though some large built churches discreetly, almost invisibly, included shields among the other decorative elements on their painted ceiling beams.
Nonheraldic pictorial graffiti—animals, buildings, faces—are difficult to connect with status in specific ways. They may have had such meaning to their creators, but what subsequent viewers would be impressed by them? Verbal graffiti that included the names of their inscribers might have had additional associations with status but they are more appropriately discussed in Chapter 6 as practices in places of worship.
Family Status
Both Christians and Jews were keenly aware of their family’s social standing. Individuals recorded in documents as owning property were certainly among the Salentine well-to-do, and these included the ancestors of Ahima‘az, who, in the ninth and tenth centuries, owned one or more vineyards, fields, orchards, and gardens.42 Participating in literary and cultural life,