Although the Cosmati of 12th Century Rome are the eponymous craftsmen of the style, they do not seem to have been the first to develop the art. A similar style may be seen in the pavement of the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino (1066–1071), built using workers from Constantinople, making it likely that the geometric style was heavily influenced by Byzantine floor mosaics. However, the technique is distinct because Cosmati floors are made from various shapes and sizes of stone, a property quite different from opus tessellatum mosaics in which the patterns are made from small units which are all the same size and shape. The stone used by the Cosmati artists were often salvaged material (cf. upcycling) from the ruins of ancient Roman buildings, the large roundels being the carefully cut cross sections of Roman columns.Paloma Pajares-Ayuela: Cosmatesque Ornament, W. W. Norton, 2002, p. 255
