Characteristic also is the fact that this country sees the first protective laws against the exportation of antique art. This would seem to indicate the consideration in which relics of past art were held in Rome. Judging by the way it was applied, however, even this act serves to show that there was no more genuine a passion for old and precious antiques in the Cinquecento than in the century before. The Roman laws of the sixteenth century are severe, meting out punishments to all and sundry daring to carry the produce of excavations beyond the Papal domains; but otherwise destruction goes on gaily, there seems to be no discrimination as to what ought to be saved from the doom of destruction and what is not worth keeping. So while edict after edict is promulgated in order to safeguard the excavation of statues in Rome and elsewhere, edicts often full of old-fashioned magniloquence, “Prohibition concerning the exportation of marble or metal statues, figures, antiquities and suchlike,” the best buildings in Rome were allowed to fall into utter ruin without a protest. This state of things reached the climax of absurdity in the seventeenth century when Urban VIII, of the Barberini family, declared the Coliseum a public quarry, where the citizens might go for the stones they needed for new constructions--an act still commemorated in the protest of all lovers of art with the proverbial pun, _Quod non fecerunt barbari fecerunt Barberini_ (What barbarians did not do, the Barberini did).