Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/35

Rh sculptors, painters, and architects, were in like manner totally ruined, being submerged and buried, together with the arts themselves, beneath the miserable slaughters and ruins of that much renowned city. Painting and sculpture were the first to suffer, as arts ministering rather to pleasure than utility ; while architecture, being requisite to the comfort and safety of life, was still maintained, although not in its earlier excellence. Indeed, had it not been that sculpture and painting still placed before the eyes of the existing generation, the representations of those whom they were accustomed to honour, and to whom they gave an immortality, the very memory, both of one and the other, would have been soon extinguished. Of these, some were commemorated by statues, and by inscriptions, which abounded in and on the different public and private buildings, as theatres, baths, aqueducts, temples, obelisks, colossal figures, pyramids, arches, reservoirs, and public treasuries, and lastly, in the sepulchres themselves, the great part of which were destroyed by those unbridled barbarians who had nothing of humanity but the name and image. Conspicuous among these were the Visigoths, who, having made Alaric their king, invaded Italy and assaulted Rome, which they twice sacked without restraint of any kind. The same thing was done by the Vandals, who came from Africa, under Genseric, their king ; and he, not content with the booty and prey that he took, or with the cruelties that he practised, carried the people away as slaves, to their extreme misery. Among these captives was Eudoxia, widow of the Emperor Valentinian, who had been slain, no long time previously, by his own soldiers. For all the best having long before departed to Byzantium with the Emperor Constantine, those remaining had in great part degenerated from the ancient valour of Rome ; neither was order or decency any longer to be found among them. Every virtue, nay, all true men, had departed together ; laws, name, customs, the very language, all were lost ; and amidst these calamities, all acting together, and each effecting its own share of the mischief, every exalted mind had sunk in the general degradation, every noble spirit become debased.

But infinitely more ruinous than all other enemies to the arts above named, was the fervent zeal of the new Christian religion, which, after long and sanguinary combats, had finally