flat, but is more usually vaulted, and sometimes rises into a cupola.
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| Fig. 8.—Table-tomb. |
Both the roof and the walls are almost universally coated with stucco and covered with fresco paintings—in the earlier works merely decorative, in the later always symbolical or historical. Each side of the cubiculum, except that of the entrance, usually contains a recessed tomb, either a table-tomb or an arcosolium. That facing the entrance was the place of greatest honour, where in many instances the remains of a martyr were deposited, whose tomb, according to primitive usage, served as an altar for the celebration of the eucharist. This was sometimes, as in the Papal crypt of St Calixtus (fig. 10), protected from irreverence by lattice work (transennae) of marble. The cubiculum was originally designed for the reception of a very limited number of dead. But the natural desire to be buried near one’s relatives caused new tombs to be cut in the walls, above and around and behind the original tombs, the walls being thus completely honeycombed with loculi, sometimes as many as seventy, utterly regardless of the paintings originally depicted on the walls. Another motive for multiplying the number of graves operated when the cubiculum contained the remains of any noted saint or martyr. The Christian antiquary has cause continually to lament the destruction of works of art due to this craving. One of the most perfect examples of early Christian pictorial decoration, the so-called “Dispute with the Doctors,” in the catacomb of Calixtus, the “antique style of beauty” of which is noticed by Kugler, has thus suffered irreparable mutilation, the whole of the lower part of the picture having been destroyed by the excavation of a fresh grave-recess (Bottari, vol. ii. tav. 15). The plates of De Rossi, Ferret, and, indeed, all illustrations of the catacombs, exhibit frequent examples of the same destructive superstition. The illustrations (figs. 11 and 12), taken from De Rossi’s great work, representing two of the cubicula in the cemetery of St Calixtus, show the general arrangement of the loculi and the character of the frescoes which ornament the walls and roof. These paintings, it will be seen, are simply decorative, of the same style as the wall-paintings of the baths, and those of Pompeii.
Fig. 9.—Arcosolia. (From Bosio.)
Fig. 10.—Restoration of the Papal Crypt, Cemetery of St Calixtus.
(From de Rossi.)
Fig. 11.—Cubiculum in Cemetery of St Calixtus. (From de Rossi.)
Each cubiculum was usually the burying-place of some one family, all the members of which were interred in it, just as in the chantry-chapels connected with medieval churches. In them was celebrated the funeral-feast on the day of burial and on its anniversary, as well as the eucharist, which was the invariable accompaniment of funerals in the primitive church (Bingham, Orig. Eccl. bk. xxiii. c. iii. 12). The funeral-banquet descended to the Christian church from pagan times, and was too often profaned by heathen licence. St Augustine, in several passages, inveighs against those who thus by “gluttony and insobriety buried themselves over the buried,” and “made themselves drunk in the chapels of the martyrs, placing their excesses to the score of religious reverence for the dead.” (August., De Mor. Eccl. Cathol., c. 34, Contr. Faust, lib. xx. c. 21, Confess., lib. vi. c. 2). Some curious frescoes representing these funeral-feasts, found in the cubicula which were the scene of them, are
