Didron has written much about the influence of the drama on iconography. He thinks that in the early Middle Ages as well as in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the art of statuary may have gained much from Mystery and other plays of the time which had been pressed into the cause of religion. The “Mirror of Human Salvation” was the framework of the Divine Comedy, and of all the Mystery plays. “When examining as to what were the influences at work that aroused Italian art ... from the death-sleep of Byzantine formalism, may we not,” he asks, “attribute much of the inspiration of the thirteenth and following centuries to the drama?” Mute and motionless stood the Christian drama, and its long lines of angels and saints and martyrs had for centuries looked out with their fixed gaze from the walls and domes of solemn basilicas, till at last a vivifying and invigorating influence was brought to bear upon them.[161] Some large churches in France, such as Chartres, Rheims, Paris, Amiens, are adorned with no fewer than three or four thousand stone statues. In the Greek Church statues of every kind are strictly forbidden. The interior of the Greek churches of Russia are often covered with fresco paintings, but never do we find a single statue. St. John Damascenus in the eighth century spoke in defence of images: “Images speak, they are neither mute nor lifeless blocks, like the idols of the pagans. Images open the heart and awake the intellect, and in a marvellous and indescribable manner engage us to imitate the person they represent.”[162] And Bishop Paulinus of Nola said: “A sculptured arch in the porch of a church, or an historical glass painting in the nave, presented the ignorant with a lesson, the believer with a sermon.” We are tempted to hope that the Catholic Church in Spain may one day clear away from its sacred altars all the miserable, tawdry, and draggled objects that are called images, and confine itself to the glorious work of its inspired artists in glass and stone. But to return to our _Pórtico_. The hang of the drapery, the pose of the limbs, have all been the subject of the minutest care and of the profoundest study. We do not here see garments flying, as though blown by a rough wind, as if “in a frenzy,” as Taine remarked when he looked at some of the statues in St. Peter’s at Rome. Every bit of drapery here falls naturally into place.