If the door is a major access, and the lunette above is massive and deeply set, it may be called a tympanum.
The term is also employed to describe the section of interior wall between the curves of a vault and its springing line.
The lunettes in the structure of the Sistine Chapel ceiling inspired Michelangelo to come up with inventive compositions for the spaces.
In the Neoclassical architecture of Robert Adam and his French contemporaries such as Ange-Jacques Gabriel, a favorite scheme set a series of windows within shallow blind arches.
The Flemish painter Giusto Utens rendered a series of Medicean villas in lunette form for the third grand duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando I, in 1599–1602.