t in its perfection and purity. The very memory of painting and
sculpture would have speedily disappeared had they not represented
before the eyes of the rising generation, the distinguished men of
another age. Some of them were commemorated by effigies and by
inscriptions placed on public and private buildings, such as
amphitheatres, theatres, baths, aqueducts, temples, obelisks,
colosseums, pyramids, arches, reservoirs and treasuries, yes, and
even on the very tombs. The majority of these were destroyed and
obliterated by the barbarians, who had nothing human about them but
their shape and name. Among others there were the Visigoths, who
having made Alaric their king, invaded Italy and twice sacked Rome
without respect for anything. The Vandals who came from Africa with
Genseric, their king, did the like. But he, not content with his
plunder and booty and the cruelties he inflicted, led into servitude
the people there, to their infinite woe, and with them Eudoxia the
wife of the Emperor Valentinian, who had only recently been
assassinated by his own soldiers. These men had greatly degenerated
from the ancient Roman valour, because a great while before, the best
of them had all gone to Constantinople with the Emperor Constantine,
and those left behind were dissolute and abandoned. Thus true men and
every sort of virtue perished at the same time; laws, habits, names
and tongues suffered change, and these varied misfortunes,
collectively and singly, debased and degraded every fine spirit and
every lofty soul. But the most harmful and destructive force which
operated against these fine arts was the fervent zeal of the new
Christian religion, which, after long and sanguinary strife, had at
length vanquished and abolished the old faith of the heathen, by
means of a number of miracles and by the sincerity of its acts. Every
effort was put forth to remove and utterly extirpate the smaller
things from which errors might arise, and thus not only were the
marvellous statues, sculptures, paintings, mosaics and ornaments of
the false pagan gods destroyed and thrown down, but also the
memorials and honours of countless excellent persons, to whose
distinguished merits statues and other memorials had been set up by a
most virtuous antiquity. Besides all this, in order to build churches
for the use of the Christians, not only were the most honoured
temples of the idols destroyed, but in order to ennoble and decorate
S. Peter's with mo