Abstract

Known only through modern copies and descriptions, the iconography of the lost mosaics of the fifth-century building in the San Prisco cemetery on the Appian Way outside Capua remains unique in Early Christian art. Similarities between the composition scheme of the Capuan dome's mosaic and images in astronomical treatises, such as the miniature of the Ptolemy's easy Tables, attest to the influence of cosmological models in the mosaic's iconography. Specific connections between cosmological imagery and depictions in the Early Christian world emerge from the analysis, enabling the author to present San Prisco's mosaic as a Christian Cosmology adapted, by members of a highly cultivated ecclesiastical elite, to the devotional needs of the Capuan martyrial site.