Thomas Cole's Course of the American Empire
I teach the Roman Empire and Middle Ages at my classical charter school, and more than once I’ve been asked by individuals (not students so much) if I think “America is going to fall, like Rome.” The two civilizations seem linked in our minds, and we filter our fears of civilizational collapse through the lens of Rome’s fall (at least, what we think Rome’s fall was). It’s perhaps fitting then, that one of the most iconic images associated with the Fall of Rome is by an American artist.
If you google “Fall of the Roman Empire,” or almost anything to do with the Fall of Rome and “Edward Gibbon,” you will see within the first page (it’s the very first image result for me under “Fall of the Roman Empire”) a thumbnail of the following painting:
The image is ubiquitous, and shows up all over the place on book covers and article headers. Some readers will doubtless know that there is a companion painting, showing the same city in triumphant glory sometime before its tragic end. Together, the paintings make for a timeless contrast and warning; the glorious height before the inevitable collapse; something worthy of Shakespeare or Livy.
Yet these two paintings (Destruction, and Consummation of Empire), both finished in 1836, are actually part of a larger series of paintings by English-American artist Thomas Cole (1801-1848). There are five paintings in total, and together, The Course of Empire tells an even larger story of the life of a civilization. Though, as we shall see, Cole’s civilization does not represent any one historical empire, and it will be worth exploring whether or not the famous Destruction painting and its successor (for that is not the end of the cycle) actually represents the historical fall of Rome.
Thomas Cole was an English-born American immigrant, largely self-taught, who became one of the most famous painters of the Hudson River School of landscape artists. Cole’s paintings show grand vistas and dominating scenery, and most of his paintings are physically large and packed with detail. I haven’t seen the Course of Empire in person, but I did see Cole’s The Voyage of Life series once in the National Gallery in Washington, which managed to make a real impression, despite the fact that I was fresh out of college at the time, and possess no great eye for art.
The Course of Empire series, like Voyage of Life, is meant to be viewed together as part of a complete visual narrative, though each painting also thoroughly rewards individual appreciation. The series packs considerable detail, and should be viewed both at a distance, and up close. While the civilization depicted is mostly (though not entirely) Greco-Roman in its visual motifs, the series remains, as we shall see, thoroughly American.
(Blog update: Hello everyone, it’s been a while. Thank you to everyone who expressed well-wishes and concerns for my family, we are doing much better than we were last year. I hope to return to posting, aiming for about an article a month going forward.)
The Savage State1
The first painting in the series is The Savage State. Viewed from a distance, we see a wild and untamed wilderness. In the background, a rising sun and morning breeze drive away night and fog. In the center, a single proud mountain peak rises up to meet the day (pay attention to the boulder on top, as it will be important). While the Sun brings the morning, we only see it filtered behind the tall trees which border the left-hand side of the painting. Beneath this backdrop, we mostly observe rough nature, as wild trees and water crowd the bottom-half of the canvas.
Yet, if we draw close, we can see some first fearful human steps. On the left, backlit by the rising sun, a hunter clad in skins chases a wounded deer (the deer is down by the brook at the bottom of the painting). The hunter has bright red-orange tassels on his bow. In the distance, a small hunting group traverses the wilderness, and on the bottom-right two canoes explore a river. Finally, in the distance we see a small settlement, and individuals dancing around a fire. Their dwellings look Native-American.
Overall, nature is overwhelmingly dominant in The Savage State. The natural world looms large, and humans are almost insignificant. Yet we see that man has tamed fire, and built tools (bow, canoe) and while the most vivid human in the painting is the individual hunter, we also see a very primitive community, with what may be ceremony or ritual.
The Arcadian or Pastoral State
In the second painting in the series, we see a bright valley in mid-morning. Nature is no longer imposing, but has been tamed and softened. Humans engage in pastoralism and agriculture, and are at play, producing music and dancing. In the bottom left, an old man draws geometric proofs in the dirt, and a woman holds a distaff used for spinning wool, while she watches her son draw a foreshadowing image of a soldier (an actual soldier can be seen in between the mother and the old man). In the distance, we see a settlement, and a boat being built for exploration, or war. Above the town, a procession of figures walk up towards a huge megalith, around which tiny figures can barely be seen congregating around an enormous bonfire.
Finally, off in the distance to the left, sits the same mountain peak and solitary boulder, though now less proud and towering, and instead softer and at rest. This is the same valley and mountain as in The Savage State, and we (the viewer) have now moved down into the valley, closer to the human settlement.
Overall, the Arcadian or Pastoral State depicts an idyllic state in its eager youth. While the painting is peaceful, many motifs hint at latent energy and potential, from the building of the (war)ship, to the child’s drawing of the soldier, and even the woman’s distaff, suggesting industry and trade. The huge fire in the temple suggests piety and fervor. While the human settlement in The Savage State feels Native-American, the Arcadian town feels more Greco-Roman, apart from the very Stonehenge-esque megalith. The returning soldier has a red-orange tassel on his spear, just as on the hunter’s bow.
The Consummation of Empire
The scene has shifted dramatically. At over six feet in width, this is the largest painting of the series, and almost every inch of space beneath the afternoon late-Summer sky is crowded with detail. The viewer has now moved down into the city itself, near the harbor we saw in the previous painting. The lone mountain and boulder can now be found, sidelined, in the distance. On close inspection, walls and aqueducts run almost to the top of the mountain. Everywhere else, man reigns, and nature retreats.
The megalith has been replaced by monumental domed and colonnaded temples opposite a grand palatial structure, with the two sides of the harbor joined by a bridge. Golden ships glide into the harbor on glass-calm waters, while a triumphal procession complete with conquering hero atop an elephant crosses the bridge, amidst a crowd of soldiers, senators, and trophies. On the temple side of the harbor vast crowds (truly vast, the number of figures is astonishing when the viewer zooms in) come out to receive the conquering Prince, while on the palace side, an imperial woman reclines in observation of the proceedings. Though small and mostly at distance, green flags can be seen on the temple side, and orange standards on the palace side. In the bottom right, an old man pensively reads a book, and nearby, two small boys, clad in orange and green, appear to be roughhousing or fighting.
Destruction
Now the most famous painting in the series. It is evening, and a roiling nature with anxious waves and colliding clouds hiding the moon reflect the city writhing in its death-throes. Opposing forces, green banners from the temple side, and orange from the palace, tear at each other upon the now-broken bridge, while ships in the harbor clash, burn and founder. Above them, the city burns, while the statue of a heroic champion thrusts its headless torso forward. The statue stands roughly in the same location–possibly replacing a statue of Athena Nike–as the imperial viewing platform from the previous painting.
In the foreground, individual tragedies emerge from the general chaos. A woman throws herself from a ledge, while another is grabbed by the hair, a dead child at her feet. A shrouded figure next to the statue’s broken head sits beside a dead boy, and in the pool near where the two young brothers roughhoused in the previous painting, now sits an old man in green with bowed head, leaning against a dead figure clad in orange.
The solitary mountain and rock watch on in the background.
Desolation
There is a final painting in the series. In Desolation, the ruins of the city lie broken and decaying under the moon at night, while clouds wisp along. The remains of the bridge across the harbor, and some of the temple colonnade are still visible. The remains of the round temple (similar to that of the Vestal Virgins in the Roman forum) adorn the hill to the left, and a single large column dominates the foreground.
A melancholy stillness pervades the painting as the works of man decay, and nature remains, reclaiming her own. Trees, bushes, and vines grow up everywhere and creep over the rocks. A heron builds a nest on the large column, which also has a lizard scurrying up its side (I’m not sure why, but my students found the presence of the lizard oddly amusing).
Mankind retreats, nature remains, and the solitary rock atop the mountain remains unchanged, as an empire finishes its course.
Geology, Nature, and Polis
The narrative beats in the series are vivid, and probably feel quite familiar to many viewers. Human polities seem glorious and grand in their moment, but they are rendered momentary when placed next to the grand sweep of geologic deep time. Cole’s use of the mountain and rock are not only clever orientation devices, but also good examples of how the emerging field of geology in the 19th century was beginning to grapple with the apparent age of the Earth. In fact, Cole was working on the Course of Empire series at almost exactly the same time as Charles Darwin was discovering marine fossils in the Andes mountains and theorizing about their age. Only six years after Cole completed the Course series, Sir Richard Owen would coin the name Dinosauria for his fossil discoveries in England. Suddenly, even millenia-old empires didn’t seem so permanent.
If Cole’s depiction of nature and geology was cutting-edge for its day, his civilizational riffs and visual motifs were already well-established in Western art and philosophy, going back to the ancients themselves, as anyone familiar with the cycles of regime change (anacyclosis) found in Plato and Polybius will know. Rise and Fall seem like inevitable parts of a society’s life-cycle, and the strong contrast with nature in the Course of Empire series helps imply that this is the natural life cycle of a human community.
Aristotle said that man is a political animal meant to live in community, and that man living outside of a polis isn’t truly able to flourish. In a very real sense, man’s “natural” state is to do something at odds with the rest of nature (as the observation goes, the Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city). Etymologically, “civilization” implies living in a city, and even the tamed green spaces of regency gardens or New York’s Central Park involve human shaping and direction over nature. It seems that man either banishes, or domesticates nature. At least until nature gets the last laugh. As Horace said, you can drive Nature out with a pitchfork, but she’ll always come back in.
Rome
While not a literal representation of Rome, the classical imagery of the paintings, and the fame of Rome’s fall (Gibbon had only published his Decline and Fall a few decades prior) make it almost impossible not to link the two in the viewer's mind. Indeed the ruins of the Roman forum and Colosseum have been painted many times since the Renaissance. As the Tiber resumed its annual flooding with the collapse of the city’s infrastructure, the low-lying Forum area began to fill up with silt deposits. At its nadir around the time of Charlemagne, the city’s population may have sunk below thirty-thousand inhabitants, leaving room for animals to graze in its center, and providing subject matter for later artists drawn to Rome by church patronage and classical memory.
Cole’s Desolation painting, then, is superficially similar to many other paintings that reflect on ancient ruins. Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691-1765) painted the Forum several times, and William Turner himself (1775-1851), the famous English landscapist, painted Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino in 1839, just three years after Cole completed Desolation. “Campo Vacinno” means “cow pasture.”
So, the connection between Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire series and the Fall of Rome seems straightforward. To Renaissance and early modern Europeans, Rome’s fall must have seemed distant and jarring, creating a sense of finality and separation between antiquity and “modern” day. If even the civilization which built the Colosseum could fall, then all other cities must prove similarly mortal.
Yet Thomas Cole’s subject isn’t actually Rome, and his Desolation is sharply different from Panini and Turner’s landscapes in at least one key aspect. In telling his abstract cyclical narrative, Cole’s empire comes from nature, and returns to nature, with nothing except nature itself either preceding or succeeding it. But Panini and Turner’s landscapes really are of the Roman forum itself, and so can’t help but capture the fact that the city of Rome did not return to nature and dust, but remained inhabited and lived in. Cole’s Desolation is aptly named, while Neoclassical and Romantic-era landscape paintings across Europe contain scenes of idyllic human life carrying on in the shadows of great ruins.
We could interrupt the artistic meditation here and do a pedantic “well actually…” interlude, and start blaming Thomas Cole for not appreciating the continued flourishing of the Eastern Roman Empire (which reconquered Italy under Justinian after all), or bring up the historiographic debate about whether Rome really fell or transformed in the first place, and how much people living through the “Fall of Rome” would have identified with our popular understanding of the event as inspired by Gibbon and paintings like Cole’s Destruction. And I do think it’s fair to note that the actual history of the end of the Western Roman Empire is far more complicated than is generally understood, and doesn’t offer clear-cut morality tales about decadence or inevitable decline. More than a few “we’re going to fall just like Rome” appeals in popular discourse are irresponsible.
I hope that last paragraph wasn’t too much of a back-handed swipe at Cole, because I’d rather appreciate him for what he obviously did know and was concerned about, and not be overly harsh on him, even though the Destruction painting remains one of the foremost images linked with the Fall of Rome. I’d rather point out what we ought to link the entire Course series with instead. And for that, let’s go back to the first painting in the series.
Not only do the humans in The Savage State hint at Native American motifs, but the landscape itself suggests the raw wilderness of North America. This may not be a pristine garden, but it is Edenic, playing on all the tropes in American history about building a new Jerusalem in an unfallen (not “Old”) New World ready for Civilization. Perhaps the only thing preventing the solitary mountain and boulder from becoming a shining city on a hill is Cole’s own anxiety and fears about collapse. Course of Empire is very much about the course of the American empire.
By contrast, even ancient pagan myths about the origins of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean don’t really start from nothing. Hesiod and Ovid’s ages of men started with golden ages ruled by the Gods, and Rome and Greece were both very conscious of their Bronze-Aged predecessors. A truly Greco-Roman Course of Empire series would replace the solitary mountain and boulder with the windy walls and towers of Priam’s Ilium. And almost any painting of medieval or early modern Rome which shifted the frame just beyond the silted-up and cow-pastured Forum, would reveal the Eternal City continuing to dominate the moral imagination of Europe. Any worthwhile Papal Procession and high feast day would evoke Consummation all over again, and repeated clashes and alliances between the German “Kings of the Romans” and their Papal rivals played out the scene from Destruction multiple times. Emperor Charles V sacked Rome in 1527, but the grand city simply kept building new layers of dazzling polished stone over old and faded ones, the scorch-marks of fires and repurposing of old marble merely molding the contours of the city with new depth and texture.
Rather like the geologic strata of a mountain.
For all of these paintings, Substack’s full-size view when you click on them still doesn’t capture the detail. Click through to the Wikipedia files themselves in the image credit links, and you can zoom in and see just how much Cole packs into each painting.
Good to read your work again!
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