been changed; and all these things together and
each by itself had caused every lovely mind and lofty intellect to
become most brutish and most base.

But what brought infinite harm and damage on the said professions, even
more than all the aforesaid causes, was the burning zeal of the new
Christian religion, which, after a long and bloody combat, with its
wealth of miracles and with the sincerity of its works, had finally cast
down and swept away the old faith of the heathens, and, devoting itself
most ardently with all diligence to driving out and extirpating root and
branch every least occasion whence error could arise, not only defaced
or threw to the ground all the marvellous statues, sculptures, pictures,
mosaics, and ornaments of the false gods of the heathens, but even the
memorials and the honours of numberless men of mark, to whom, for their
excellent merits, the noble spirit of the ancients had set up statues
and other memorials in public places. Nay more, it not only destroyed,
in order to build the churches for the Christian use, the most honoured
temples of the idols, but in order to ennoble and adorn S. Pietro (to
say nothing of the ornaments which had been there from the beginning) it
also robbed of its stone columns the Mausoleum of Hadrian, now called
the Castello di S. Angelo, and many other buildings that to-day we see
in ruins. And although the Christian religion did not do this by reason
of hatred that it bore to the arts, but only in order to humiliate and
cast down the gods of the heathens, it was none the less true that from
this most ardent zeal there came so great ruin on these honoured
professions that their very form was wholly lost. And as if aught were
wanting to this grievous misfortune, there arose against Rome the wrath
of Totila, who, besides razing her walls and destroying with fire and
sword all her most wonderful and noble buildings, burnt the whole city
from end to end, and, having robbed her of every living body, left her a
prey to flames and fire, so that there was not found in her in eighteen
successive days a single living soul; and he cast down and destroyed so
completely the marvellous statues, pictures, mosaics, and works in
stucco, that there was lost, I do not say only their majesty, but their
very form and essence. Wherefore, it being the lower rooms chiefly of
the palaces and other buildings that were wrought with stucco, with
painting, and with statuary, there was buried