Mosaics in churches in Rome (3rd-7th centuries)
In Rome, one of the most elaborate series of mosaics is in Santa Costanza, a domed circular building reputed to have been used as the burial chapel of Constantine's daughter. The mosaics are ambivalent in their imagery; the probably late Antique ones in the vaulting of the ambulatory are only Christian in that some of the motifs later acquired Christian meanings. The late 4th-century apse mosaic of Santa Pudenziana, Rome, is the most hieratically explicit, and clearly didactic. The largest series of early mosaic decorations in Rome are the panels on the triumphal arch and the nave walls of Santa Maria Maggiore.
