Velificatio Velificatio Velificatio is a stylistic device used in ancient Roman art to frame a deity by means of a billowing garment. It represents "vigorous movement," an epiphany, or "the vault of heaven," often appearing with celestial, weather, or sea deities. It is characteristic of the iconography of the Aurae, the Breezes personified, and one of the elements which distinguish representations of Luna, the Roman goddess of the Moon, alluding to her astral course. A figure so framed is a velificans (plural velificantes). Not all deities are portrayed as "velificantes", but the device might be used to mark a member of
Celestial spheres was a lasting remnant of physical celestial spheres in Kepler's cosmology. In Cicero's "Dream of Scipio," the elder Scipio Africanus describes an ascent through the celestial spheres, compared to which the Earth and the Roman Empire dwindle into insignificance. A commentary on the "Dream of Scipio" by the Roman writer Macrobius, which included a discussion of the various schools of thought on the order of the spheres, did much to spread the idea of the celestial spheres through the Early Middle Ages. Some late medieval figures noted that the celestial spheres' physical order was inverse to their order on the