Cole painted The Arch of Nero at the height of his powers in 1846, drawing upon his memory and sketches made in Italy in 1832. A boldly composed image with Cole’s typically expressive handling, the subject focuses on a monumental arch, ravaged by the passage of time and seen against green hills and a bright blue sky with gathering clouds. Known as the “Arch of Nero” in Cole’s day, the subject of this painting was actually part of an ancient Roman aqueduct near Tivoli. To Cole, this ruin served as a meditation on the transitory glory of empires and the cycle of rise and fall of civilizations repeated throughout world history. The aura of emperor Nero’s violent and decadent rule (54–68 CE) hangs over this painting, representing in Cole’s vision an era when the Roman republic had devolved into a corrupt and tyrannical empire. Painted in the year that the United States invaded Mexico in a thinly veiled land grab, The Arch of Nero calls to mind the similarly greedy expansion of the Roman empire and its ultimate ruin. As the Cole scholar William L. Coleman has noted, the artist’s lesson on the fate of tyrants, his concern over the erosion of republican values in this country, and his critique of the nation’s expansion of colonial (and slaveholding) territories—implicit in his choice of the subject of this painting and its red, white, and blue-clad figures—remains pertinent today.
