From the first version of the Descriptio and throughout the following six hundred years, the Ark of the Covenant played a significant role at the Lateran Church, whether as argument, as liturgical object or as relic. The transferral of the sacred Ark and the rods from the innermost area of the papal high altar to devotional exposure in the fourteenth century (after the fire at the Lateran in 1308), and finally into oblivion in the eighteenth century, is a story about changed meanings and changed contexts of interpretation. When Pope Benedict XIV realized, in 1745, that the basilica still had these obscure artefacts on display, they had already lost their significance as liturgical objects. The Ark and the rods served no purpose in this ‘rationalist’ time. The Ark was moreover regarded as a fake and thus not even given a place in the pope's collection of treasures.

A modern visitor to the Lateran Church enters a very different space from the one described by the twelfth-century canons. Pilgrims from all over the world still gather in the basilica and most of them probably do not know what the church hides – rather akin to the situation described in the prologue of the Descriptio. As noted above, the history of the Ark of the Covenant at the Lateran was brought to a definitive end in the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, traces of the ideology supporting the claim to possess the Ark can still be seen in the baroque furnishings and decorations that replaced the medieval interior. The frescoes in the transept depict the Constantinian foundation of the cathedral, as well as the legendary apparition of Christ during the first consecration. The sacrament altar is flanked by statues of Moses and Aaron. On the left of the door to the sacristy, a thirteenth-century tablet is bricked up in the wall.3 The inscription says that the Ark of the Covenant and the other temple objects are underneath the high altar and that Titus and Vespasian caused them to be transferred from Jerusalem to Rome by the Jews.