LUNETTE. - In architecture, a lunette is understood as the space resulting from the meeting of a vault with a flat surface; thus in a bay covered by a groin vault, a sail vault, or a lunetted barrel vault, the lunettes are the spaces between corbel and corbel. Depending on the arch that generates it, the lunette may be semicircular, pointed, or segmental.
Already in the earliest Christian times the pictorial decoration of lunettes is very frequent, in fresco (cubicles of the catacombs), in mosaic (mausoleum of Galla Placidia and S. Vitale in Ravenna), in inlay (baptistery of the Orthodox, also in Ravenna). The decoration of lunettes in atria and especially in cloisters lent itself to cyclic representations; famous examples survive from the fifteenth century onward (green cloister of S. Maria Novella in Florence, by Paolo Uccello; little cloister of the Voti of the Annunziata by A. Baldovinetti, A. del Sarto, Franciabigio, Pontormo and Rosso; cloister of the charterhouse of Val d'Ema, by Pontormo, etc.); for the most part they represent episodes from the lives of saints of the Order to which the church belongs (cloister of Monteoliveto near Siena, with Stories of St. Benedict, by Signorelli and Sodoma; cloister of S. Marco in Florence, with Stories of St. Antoninus, by Pocetti).
The name of lunette is also given to the space above the door, between the arch and the architrave, and hence to the sculpted panel that often forms its decoration, and generally to any semicircular sculpted panel. Lunettes of portals and bas-reliefs are found in the Romanesque period (13th century: S. Zeno of Verona, S. Clemente at Casauria; 13th century: pieve of Arezzo, baptistery of Parma, cathedral of Lucca, etc.) and even more frequently in the fourteenth century (cathedral of Lucca, Deposition attributed to Nicola Pisano; S. Martino of Pisa, attributed to Andrea da Pontedera). Among the countless examples of the Renaissance one recalls the innovation in color introduced by Luca della Robbia with his lunettes of glazed terracotta, white and polychrome.
Finally, lunette is also the name for the semicircular crowning of altarpieces in use in the second half of the fifteenth century, especially in northern Italy, and almost always depicting the Pietà (Cosmè Tura, Louvre; Crivelli, Brera and Vatican Pinacoteca; Lotto, S. Cristina near Treviso, etc.).
Emma Zocca