AURELI, Hypogeum of the. - Discovered in Rome in 1919 near the Viale Manzoni, this burial complex consists of four chambers built at different levels and made up of an atrium and three rooms with a later development of burial galleries. It is valuable above all for its paintings, whose date probably goes back to the first decades of the 3rd century and whose content presents a mixture of strictly Christian subjects with elements wholly foreign to the usual Christian repertoire.
The first chamber, at ground level, has preserved on the back wall a double composition referring to the creation and the fall of the First Parents, while on the side walls appear four figures of doctors of the Church linked to one another by architectural backgrounds. In the atrium, among others, a male figure is notable who points to a cross that has appeared above. In the second chamber, below the first, the central composition of the vault (a veiled woman between two old men, one of whom holds a virga taumaturga over the woman's head), the whole bathed in a reddish light, the numerous isolated figures of men holding in their hands the scroll and the rod, as well as a figure of a naked woman holding an open veil with both hands, give a glimpse of unorthodox beliefs, with which the number twelve, noted in the mixed groups of men and women depicted at the back of the arcosolia, will have some connection. The cubiculum, on the other hand, is characteristic for the frequent repetition of the figure of the Good Shepherd and for the presence, on the walls, of tall figures of men in whom the group of the Apostles seems to be recognizable. There are also seen there the Sermon on the Mount, a banquet scene with twelve guests, a probable evocation of the Heavenly City and, finally, two compositions still much debated. The first depicts the arrival of a horseman welcomed at the gates of the city by a dense group of citizens; the other, on a background depicting countryside, presents three naked men before a hut and the conversation of a woman with a man seated on the ground; between the two groups, a loom. In the floor of this chamber is found the mosaic epitaph placed by an Aurelius Felicissimus for his brothers and fellow freedmen Aurelius, Onesimus, Aurelius Papirius and Aurelia Prima Virgo.
Among the numerous syncretistic or heretical sects, it remains difficult to establish who the owner of this hypogeum was.
Bibliography3 works
Luciano de Bruyne