«The Course of Empire is a series of five paintings created by the English-born American painter Thomas Cole between 1833 and 1836, which depicts the growth and fall of an imaginary city. The Course of Empire comprises the following works: The Course of Empire – The Savage State (1); The Arcadian or Pastoral State (2); The Consummation of Empire (3); Destruction (4); and Desolation (5).»
Aeternum
Ancient Rome by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1700s
"You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove to you that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains—I can prove to you that those were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient States—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome."
Aeternum
Icebound Ship, William Bradford
Ice Dwellers, Watching the Invaders, 1879, William Bradford