The Bank of England ruined

Earlier this evening I attended a lecture in which a picture of this painting was shown.

It is by an architectural artist called Joseph Gandy. The image really grabbed me. Some of what grabbed me I found  picked up in a Guardian article about the artist.

Gandy painted a fantasy view of the Bank of England - Soane's proudest work - in ruins. The City of London is imagined as a swampy wilderness, as desolate as the Roman Forum in the dark ages. It is the earliest example in Europe of a drawing in which an architect imagines a structure he has built as a ruin. At one level, it is a meditation on the future of the British Empire. Babylon and Memphis, Carthage, Athens, and Rome ... why not London?

This picture is beautiful in its craftsmanship but it also appeals to the part of me that loves the 'what if...' that lies behind much sci-fi. But I noted that the slide told us that it was painted in 1830 when the British Empire was really getting into its swing -the financial heart would be this building. But then I realised that this picture does something else that I tend to appreciate in a good sci-fi story: it relativises human pretensions; we are confronted with the reminder that 'this too shall pass'; that all our grand achievements are insignificant, transitory; vanitas vanitorum; kol hebel. And as Empire gains strength, this painting seems to say, prophetically, "Fallen is Babylon ..."