by the ruins from above
all that good work that has been discovered in our own day, and those
who came after, judging the whole to be in ruins, planted vines thereon,
in a manner that, since the said lower rooms remained under the ground,
the moderns have called them grottoes, and "grotesque" the pictures that
are therein seen at the present day.

After the end of the Ostrogoths, who were destroyed by Narses, men were
living among the ruins of Rome in some fashion, poorly indeed, when
there came, after 100 years, Constantine II, Emperor of Constantinople,
who, although received lovingly by the Romans, laid waste, robbed, and
carried away all that had remained, more by chance than by the good will
of those who had destroyed her, in the miserable city of Rome. It is
true, indeed, that he was not able to enjoy this booty, because, being
carried by a sea-tempest to Sicily and being justly slain by his own
men, he left his spoils, his kingdom, and his life a prey to Fortune.
But she, not yet content with the woes of Rome, to the end that the
things stolen might never return, brought thither for the ruin of the
island a host of Saracens, who carried off both the wealth of the
Sicilians and the spoils of Rome to Alexandria, to the very great shame
and loss of Italy and of Christendom. And so all that the Pontiffs had
not destroyed (and above all S. Gregory, who is said to have decreed
banishment against all the remainder of the statues and of the spoils of
the buildings) came finally, at the hands of that most rascally Greek,
to an evil end; in a manner that, there being no trace or sign to be
found of anything that was in any way good, the men who came after,
although rude and boorish, and in particular in their pictures and
sculptures, yet, incited by nature and refined by the air, set
themselves to work, not according to the rules of the aforesaid arts,
which they did not know, but according to the quality of their own
intelligence.

The arts of design, then, having been brought to these limits both
before and during the lordship of the Lombards over Italy and also
afterwards, continued gradually to grow worse, although some little work
was done, insomuch that nothing could have been more rudely wrought or
with less design than what was done, as bear witness, besides many other
works, certain figures that are in the portico of S. Pietro in Rome,
above the doors, wrought in the Greek manner in memory of certain holy
fathe