Here is the description of a Christian shrine by St. Gregory of Nyssa (fourth century)--"Whoso cometh unto some spot like this, where there is a monument of the just and a holy relic, his soul is gladdened by the magnificence of what he beholds, seeing a house as God's temple elaborated most gloriously, both in the magnitude of the structure, and the beauty of the surrounding ornament. There the artificer has fashioned wood into the shape of animals; and the stone-cutter has polished the slabs to the smoothness of silver; and the painter has introduced the flowers of his art, depicting and imaging the constancy of the martyrs, their resistance, their torments, the savage forms of their tyrants, their outrages, the blazing furnace and the most blessed end of the champion; the representation of Christ in human form presiding over the contest--all these things as it were in a book gifted with speech; shaping for us by means of colours, has he cunningly discoursed to us of the martyr's struggles, has made this temple glorious as some brilliant fertile mead. For the silent tracery on the walls has the art to discourse, and to aid most powerfully. And he who has arranged the mosaics has made this pavement on which we tread equal to a history." (From Father Mulroody's translation, in _San Clemente_, pp. 34, 35. St. Gregory wrote before A.D. 395.[200]) No doubt the richness of colour in these Byzantine mosaics inspired the taste for pictorial embellishment in the interiors of buildings, and the Comacines, not having Greek mosaicists at command, found an easier and quicker method of writing their scriptures on their walls--_i.e._ fresco. The first mention of frescoes is of those in the palace of Theodolinda, where her Lombards were portrayed on the walls. Several Lombard churches also retain signs of having been frescoed.