2. The iconoclasts proper, who not only condemned image worship in the sense just explained but rejected all religious art whatever. Fleeting matter to their mind was not worthy to embody or reflect heavenly supersensuous energies denoted by the names of Christ and the saints. For the same reason they rejected relics and, as a rule, the worship of the cross. Statues of Christ, especially of him hanging on the cross, inspired the greatest horror and indignation; and this is why none of the graven images of Christ, common before the outbreak of the movement, survive. More than this--although the synod of 692 specially allowed the crucifix, yet Greek churches have discarded it ever since the 8th century. This idea that material representation involves a profanation of divine personages, while disallowing all religious art which goes beyond scroll-work, spirals, flourishes and geometrical designs, yet admits to the full of secular art; and accordingly the iconoclastic emperors replaced the holy pictures in churches with frescoes of hunting scenes, and covered their palaces with garden scenes where men were plucking fruit and birds singing amid the foliage. Contemporary Mahommedans did the same, for it is an error to suppose that this religion was from the first hostile to profane art. At one time the mosques were covered with mosaics, analogous to those of Ravenna, depicting scenes from the life of Mahomet and the prophets. The Arabs only forbade plastic art in the 9th century, nor were their essentially Semitic scruples ever shared by the Persians.