VEILS. - The veils that adorned the Christian basilicas certainly derive from the common use in patrician dwellings and in Roman public buildings.
The entrance doors had them both as a safeguard (St. Paulinus, Poém., XVIII, 30) and as simple ornament (ibid., XIV, 98) to express that allegorical meaning given by the apostle Paul in his epistle to the Ephesians (3, 14). The entrances were in fact either fitted with wooden or bronze doors, or, in the absence of these, were protected by heavy curtains; in either case the arch or the architrave was always fitted on the outside with a single veil, or more often a double one, which was raised by knotting it at the center, or by suspending it from two hooks fixed in the side jambs. Since no example has survived, what is known is inferred from written sources and surviving depictions. Typical illustrative examples are offered by the scene on the ivory Reliquary of Samagher, the Lateran sarcophagus no. 174 (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, pl. 121, 2-3) and the mosaics of the dome of St. George in Thessalonica. Veils are seen at the entrance of churches, as in a panel of the door of St. Sabina, in the church scratched on a funerary slab, now in the Christian Museum of the Lateran, and in the mosaics of Ravenna. Subdeacons and doorkeepers were charged with the duty of raising the door-curtains before illustrious personages (v. illustration at the entry STOFFE, vol. XI, col. 1355).
Other types of veils, each with its own characteristics, were intended for the intercolumniations of the naves (sometimes the suspension hooks or the side rings remain), for the presbytery, for the altar, for the ciborium (they are also called cortinae and tetracela), for the portico, for the narthex and for the sacristy. It is claimed that it was Constantine who first donated to the church of Constantinople veils bordered with gold. Certainly in the era of peace the pontiffs made a gift of every kind of veil (single, double, quadruple, etc.) to the churches of Rome, and from the precise description, which the Liber Pontificalis often gives of them, it is possible to determine the number and in part the very quality of the fabrics.
As to the number, this source is not always precise: sometimes the vela intended for the intercolumniations are greater in quantity, and then they are easily understood to be indicated also for the doors or for the presbytery or around the altar. As to quality, a precious source is the list contained in the Charta Cornutiana (Lib. Pont., I, p. CXLVII) which enumerates donations of the second half of the 5th century. Pope Adrian I (772-95) offered 20 veils de stauracim seu tyrea to each of the titular churches of Rome (Lib. Pont., I, p. 504). Pope Paschal I offered a series of veils to St. Mary in Domnica, to St. Cecilia in Trastevere and to St. Mary Major (ibid., II, pp. 55-56, 61). The vela were mostly of linen or silk, which in turn took particular names according to the purity of the fabric (linea pura, olosirica = all silk), of the inferior quality (tramosirica, subserica = half silk or derivatives of silk?) and of the ornaments applied (paragaudata = gallooned, loricata, auroclava paragaudata, paragaudata persica, rosulata, aquilata, cantharata, holoserica cum cancellis decorata mirifice, etc.). Other types that also recur frequently are difficult to understand: vela de stauracim seu quadrapolis, seu octapolis, de fundato, etc. The colors too present a great variety: some are common such as white (albus), pink (rhodinus), green (prasinus) and scarlet (coccus); others are difficult to determine such as coccomelinus (orange? brown?), coccoprasinus, rhodomelinus, etc.
A quality of veils certainly more precious or of a form different from the common one must have been the paratura, intended, that is, as adornment on the great feasts; and the so-called cortinae, which in their very rich decoration (cf., for example: Lib. Pont., II, 107, no. 9 ff.) testify to the high degree of perfection of Oriental manufactures.
Directly derived from the liturgical use of veils, but with purely ornamental intent and in replacement of the real ones, are the great decorations with feigned draperies on the side walls of the basilicas, in the lower zone of the apse and of the presbytery and in the calottes of the domes. Among the very numerous examples still surviving in the East and in the West, let that of St. Mary Antiqua in Rome suffice for all, where the whole range of ornamental motifs is found again which made the fineness of the various indigenous and imported products even more precious.