Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/33

Rh Font, used at the baptism of this princess and her sister, was wholly adorned with the works of earlier times?—the porphyry urn with its beautiful engraved figures, the marble candelabra admirably sculptured in rich foliage, with boys in lowrelief, which are truly beautiful. In fine, we perceive from these and many other indications, that sculpture had already fallen to decay in the time of Constantine, and with it the other noble arts. Or if anything was yet wanting to their ultimate ruin, this was amply supplied by the departure of Constantine from Rome, when he resolved to transfer the seat of empire to Byzantium ; for he then not only took all the best sculptors, and other artists of the time, whatever they may have been, with him into Greece, but he also despoiled the city of innumerable statues, and many other of the finest works of sculpture.

After the departure of Constantine, the Caesars, whom he left in Italy, continued building in Rome and elsewhere, and did their best for the execution of such works as they constructed ; but, as we see, not only sculpture, but painting and architecture, fell constantly from bad to worse, and this, perhaps, because human affairs, when they begin to decline, never cease to sink, until they have reached the lowest depths of deterioration. And accordingly, notwithstanding the architects of the time of Pope Liberius made great efforts to produce an important work in the erection of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, they did not succeed happily in all parts ; for although that church—which was also constructed for the most part of spoils—is of tolerably fair proportions, yet it cannot be denied that the ornaments in stucco and painting (to say nothing of other parts) placed around the building above the columns, betray extreme poverty of design ; or that many other portions of that vast church prove the imperfection of the arts at the period of its erection. Many years later, when the Christians suffered persecution under Julian the Apostate, a church was built on the Coelian Mount to the martyrs San Giovanni and San Paolo, and the style of this erection is so much worse than that of Santa Maria Maggiore, as to prove clearly that the art was at that time little less than totally lost. The fullest testimony is further borne to this fact by the edifices erected in Tuscany at the same period. And omit-