The Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy

Introduction

Introduction In this book I explore the visual and material culture of people who lived and died in a particular region of Italy in the Middle Ages. I investigate their names, the languages they used in public, how they were represented (and how they actually may have looked), and what components of status seem to have been important to them. I then reconstruct some of the rituals that accompanied local residents throughout their life cycles and during their worship, their daily lives, and their calendar year, focusing on those practices that can be extrapolated from visual evidence. By combining analytical methods drawn from art history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, and sociolinguistics,1 I add texture to the stylistic and iconographic analyses that have dominated art-historical study of the region and shed new light on nonelite people who are often overlooked because they have left few traces in documentary texts. The Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy is not one of those clever book titles that obscure the contents; it is, at first glance, an unambiguous and perhaps even uninspiring title. Yet not one of its principal words—“Medieval,” “Salento,” “Art,” “Identity”—is at all straightforward. These words turn out to be challenging intellectual and historical constructs that require both careful definition and a series of authorial choices. It is important to explore each of these terms to understand how they interrelate and why it is necessary, and even urgent, to consider them together in this book. I begin with the subtitle. Art “What is art?” is hardly a new question, but it seems to have become more exigent in the past century as novel forms of creativity, spurred by emerging technologies and social change, constantly appear and are frequently contested. I am concerned in this book with visual arts, not with literature or music or other creative spheres of human activity, but that restriction scarcely narrows the possible answers. Found art, environmental art, performance art, digital art are all “new” types of art that are valid to some viewers, and presumably to all of their creators, yet neither serious nor even “art” to others. It is crucial to acknowledge that definitions of art are culturally and temporally specific and, in particular, that Renaissance notions of art are not relevant to the millennium that preceded it. Despite its widespread impact over the past five centuries, the Renaissance idea of art as something finely crafted, a product of unusual skill or inspiration to be appreciated principally for its aesthetic value, is much too limiting.2 Before the European Renaissance (and also in non-European contexts), visual art had a much broader scope. Objects that qualify as art share three features: they are made to be seen; they are indexes of, and products of, social agency; and they fascinate, compel, or otherwise command attention, whether because they are difficult to execute or because they require a spectator to think as well as to see.3 These essential features of art accommodate a wide range of visual production: from objects (clothing, jewelry, painted ceramics) to decoration and embellishment (inscriptions, wall paintings, churches) to spectacles (liturgies, civic processions, funerals). Such an expansive definition of art is much closer to that used by archaeologists and anthropologists than to the one typically employed by historians of postmedieval art.4 It deliberately unites the categories of visual culture, material culture, and traditional fine art.5 All of these visual and artificial intrusions into the natural landscape had an effect on their viewers. Indeed, pre-Renaissance art was always intended to do something; it was never commissioned, produced, collected, or exhibited for its own sake.6 Exploring the motives for and the effects of visual communication, broadly defined, are among the objectives of this book. Visual communication before the Renaissance was not limited to pictorial means; it also involved texts. All texts are symbolic means of communication, but they also have visual and material qualities that make them more (or less) effective. They fully satisfy the three criteria for “art” outlined above, and at least some are meant to be seen by more than just their authors. These latter texts are those in the public domain, created to be read or viewed by multiple audiences over time and usually in perpetuity. Like many other forms of visual and material culture, public texts may be costly (e.g., professionally carved marble inscriptions) or humble (e.g., incised graffiti); what they share is the attention of readers/viewers whose...