But if one desires to see what the early Christian Comacine could do in fresco, let him go to that interesting Roman church of San Clemente, where some excavations made in 1857 revealed the ancient fourth-century Basilica, almost complete under the present one, which dates from about the twelfth century. This ancient church was built by St. Clement, the third bishop of Rome, and in it Gregory the Great read his thirty-second and thirty-eighth homilies. From the subterranean remains, with their grand ancient marble pillars and the huge semi-circle of the tribune, masked and built in though they are by the foundations of the upper church, we judge that it was a far finer building than the one above. Its walls were moreover covered with frescoes, some of which are precisely similar in style to the ones at S. Piero a Grado, also said to date before the tenth century. The frescoes, which have been discovered on the subterranean walls, are, as will be seen by our illustrations of them, in three rows, which appear to be of three different eras--two certainly. The upper band of saints and martyrs are distinctly Byzantine in style, drawing, and colouring. They show the usual rows of immobile saints and martyrs in set robes with jewelled borders, which are seen in the mosaics of the Ravenna churches. These would, I believe, date from the fourth-century church, when the Roman builders were employing Byzantine decoration. The second row beneath this is of the more naturalistic Comacine school, and would probably date from Pope Hadrian's restoration in the eighth century. In these and the frescoes of S. Piero a Grado one gets the veritable link between the conventional Byzantine school and the naturalistic Renaissance in Tuscany. Here are no longer icons or abstract images of saints; the people are no longer rigid and set, but are full of action and expression, though both are imperfectly expressed. They are, in fact, real persons and their stories. The life of St. Clement is all told in scenes. There are even portraits of living people, such as Beno di Rapizo and his wife Maria, who "for love of the blessed Clement" caused the frescoes to be painted. Nor are their children, the boy Clement (_puerulus Clemens_) and little Atilia his sister, forgotten. They are veritable portraits, for the face of Beno in two different scenes is identical. The colouring, too, is unlike the Byzantine saints above. Those are rich with solid heavy tints; these are lighter, and more in the style of the early Sienese or Tuscan ones. Beneath this row of scenes are ornamental friezes, in which one recognizes Roman classical forms naturalized into floriated scrolls, and under these a line of panelling in fresco. One panel appears to be copied from the mosaic of the ceiling at the circular church of Sta. Costanza; another is suggestive of the emblematic circles and signs of the Catacombs. A third, the most interesting of all, is the one