Fragment

Almost a century has flowed by since a great part of the nation, struck with blindness, treasured nothing but that which was new, and they called this period the Golden Age of the Arts. This blindness was indeed a general malady of those times, and in Rome, the seat of the arts, it had much more dangerous consequences. It was the period when the vain splendor of the courts got out of hand and encouraged feebleness, laziness, and servitude among peoples. The various branches of knowledge were in the hands of fashionable scholars, antechamber scholars, and people only tried to learn a lot in order to be able to talk a lot, and appear sharp and effortless. They thought they could shorten the way of reaching the sources of fields of knowledge, and in that way the sources were respected less and finally forgotten. And this corruption spread from fields of knowledge to the arts. The writings of the wise men of Greece were as little read as the statues of their artists were looked at, and the number of those who were able to contemplate the works of ancient art with real understanding was still much less than those who secretly here and there studied the monuments to the intelligence and learning of this nation for their own satisfaction.