Thus, stylistically, they may have owed a great deal to the Persian-style painting traditions in the lands from which the relics came. However, only vestiges remain today, making it difficult to ascertain this for a certainty (Derbes, 1995).

S. Maria in Cosmedin's connection with the tradition of Marian veneration and with the entire substrate of Eastern/Islamic influence is easier to trace. The church began as a fourth-century loggia, was enclosed in the sixth century (probably) and expanded into a church by Hadrian I (772-95), a time when the Islamic influence, so close to the Mediterranean and the East, could certainly have been extant. In fact, in its vicinity, in the eighth century, Orthodox refugees fleeing the Iconoclastic Controversy settled. (During the Iconoclastic Controversy, Greek orthodoxy rebelled against the use of religion icons; Islam did not allow the depiction of the Godhead in art (Schuetz-Miller, 2000), so that, arguably, there was...
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