O Arco de Nero

Thomas Cole painted this in 1846, the year the United States marched into Mexico to take its northern territory. Cole distrusted that appetite for expansion, and he had spent his career painting the rise and fall of empires. Here a crumbling arch stands against a bright sky and overgrown hills near Tivoli, in Italy. People called it the Arch of Nero in his day, though it was really part of an old Roman aqueduct. Cole had sketched such ruins on a trip through Italy in 1832 and painted this from memory more than a decade later. A couple of small figures move among the fallen stones, dwarfed by what an empire left behind.