LUMINARY. - In ancient Christian epigraphy this term sometimes occurs to indicate a vertical or oblique opening made in the tufa of the underground cemeteries to give light and air to one or more cubicula or galleries. It was often reinforced with masonry (examples in Rome, Naples, Syracuse). But it has been found that such ventilation shafts were used and were frequent also in the arenaria or pozzolana quarries, as in the arenarium later transformed into the cemetery of Commodilla, near the Via Ostiense.
St. Jerome recalls these l. which rarely broke the horror of the cemeterial darkness (In Ex. 60); Prudentius too describes the light penetrating into the cava ciscera montis of the Christian crypts (Peristephanon, XI, v. 165). An inscription now lost mentioned the purchase of a bisomus tomb situated in luminare maiore, made, for two gold solidi, by a certain Saturninus (G. Marchi, Monumenti delle arti cristiane primitive, Rome 1844, p. 165); that of a Eusebius of Antioch, attesting the purchase of the tomb « in catacumbas » near the L., is now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. In the cemetery of Domitilla, on the other hand, the epitaph is preserved of a Gallicanus who bought a bisomus tomb, in cripta ad l. Very well known is the epitaph of the deacon Severus, in Callistus, with the mention of the L. Sometimes these l. were also covered with plaster and more rarely decorated. Among these are remembered the frescoes in the L. of the crypt of St. Cecilia, in Callistus, with the images of Sts. Sebastian, Quirinus and Polycamus (G. Wilpert, La cripta dei papi e la cappella di S. Cecilia, Rome 1910, pl. 6); in the crypt known as that of St. Januarius, in Praetextatus (Wilpert, Pitture, pl. 34); in a cubiculum on the second level in the cemetery inter duas lauros (id., loc. cit., pl. 151) and in the cemetery known as that of St. Januarius of the poor, in Naples, with the majestic representation of Jesus Christ between two angels (H. Achelis, Die Katakomben von Neapel, Berlin 1936, pl. 42).
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Enrico Josi