LUMINARE. — In ancient Christian epigraphy this term is sometimes found used to indicate a vertical or oblique opening made in the tuff of underground cemeteries in order to illuminate and ventilate one or more cubicula or galleries. It was often reinforced with masonry (examples in Rome, Naples, and Syracuse). But it has been found that such ventilation shafts were also used and were frequent in the sandpits or pozzolana quarries, as in the sandpit later transformed into the Commodilla cemetery, near the Via Ostiense.
S. Girolamo recalls these l., which only rarely dispelled the horror of the cemetery darkness (In Ex. 60); Prudentius too describes the penetrating light in the cava ciscera montis of the Christian crypts (Peristephanon, XI, V. 165). An inscription now lost mentioned the purchase of a bisomous tomb situated in luminare maiore, made, for two
gold pieces, 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 Ambrosian Library in Milan. In the cemetery of Domitilla, on the other hand, the epitaph of a Gallicanus is preserved, who purchased a bisomous tomb, in cripta ad l. The epitaph of the deacon Severus, in Callistus, with its mention of the L., is very well known. Sometimes these l. were also coated with plaster and, more rarely, decorated. Among these are the frescoes in the L. of the crypt of S. Cecilia, in Callistus, with the images of the ss. Sebastiano, Quirino, and Policamo (G. Wilpert, La cripta dei papi e la cappella di S. Cecilia, Rome 1910, pl. 6); in the crypt called that of S. Gennaro, 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 called that of S. Gennaro dei poveri, in Naples, with the majestic representation of Jesus Christ between two angels (H. Achelis, Die Katakomben von Neapel, Berlin 1936, pl. 42).
#### LUNA: V. NEOMENIA.