A column from Qartaba in Lebanon shows four busts, paired: one man wears Greek dress and has the 'period face' of the Roman 150s AD; two women are so laden with ornate hairstyle, headdress and veil that their faces are shrunk to fit within the
aedicule; and one man wears a Greek himation (outer garment) with a local priestly hat and leafy bough.
What is most fascinating is the '
aedicule' which is the shrine enclosing the tomb where Jesus is buried.
This area is called the Anastasis (Resurrection) and in the center is a large
aedicule built over the site of the Tomb.
It represents a very special place to Christians all over the world for containing the tomb of Jesus the Christ and many monuments of his memory, like the Stone of Anointing, where Jesus' body is said to have been anointed before burial, the altar of the Crucifixion, the rock of Calvary as seen in the Chapel of Adam, the
Aedicule, the Prison of Christ, etc.
Many architectural effects are achieved in that way, by the "nesting" of one
aedicule within another, so that the order radiates outward from the smallest unit across the facade of the building.
(12) The prison under the tower of the church steeple from the Royal Court of Moldavia, compared with the terrible Ottoman prison
Aedicule, was the ruthless sign of death because, wrote the author, people locked up here "had no hope to survive." The Organic Regulations came into force in 1832-1832 and brought a significant revival in improving the state of prisons; the connoisseurs of the subject revealed, however that they kept their repressive nature until the middle of this century.
The domed edifice behind King Herod as he questions Christ on a tabernacle shutter at Oxford painted by the Florentine San Gaggio Master a few years later, and the gothicized
aedicule in Giotto's Ognissanti Madonna of about 1310 present alternative forms for the same device.
Underlying the different stages of Nagara and Dravida temple forms and their variations is, according to Hardy, the
aedicule. An
aedicule is a small building, as a shrine, imitating the form of the larger building.
(29) Acutia Blanda's
aedicule has, besides the image of Acutia Blanda herself, two additional reliefs on the sides of the monument.
He writes eloquently of the way in which "the
aedicule," a miniature semblance of house, is a device that was used often in Classical and Mediaeval architecture and painting to enframe and give importance to a god or saint or, as in the case of Pompeian Wall Painting, to fill an area with images of places that could be inhabited [Summerson, John.
So, beneath layers of accretion and the
aedicule of the Holy Sepulchre, through which modern tourists pass in an endless reverent queue, is the genuine rock tomb.