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Flirtation with the aesthetics of urban apocalypse (distasteful already post-Dresden, Hiroshima) has, after 9/11, become definitively unfeasible.

The Fall of Constantinople in 1453 left a Byzantine commentator almost inarticulate with grief:

"O City, chief City of all Cities, City centre of all parts of the World. O City….second Paradise…"

Nothing could be sadder than a simple diary entry of John Evelyn for 10th September 1666, after the Fire of London:

"I went again to the ruins, for it was now no longer a City."

We can deeply mourn buildings. The space occupied by the World Trade Center Towers disturbs me very much. But it had all been anticipated. One of the shocking things on that day was how closely urban assault conformed to the comic book/disaster movie scenes repeatedly rehearsed through the sixties, seventies, eighties. The most standardised feature of all these was the crowd running towards the camera arms raised in horror. Stockhausen's comment "the greatest work of art in the Universe" was hateful but true. The aesthetics of this event are inescapable. In purely Burkean terms we have never seen an event so 'sublime'. I never look at those pictures. I am ashamed of the aesthetic frisson they incite in me.

Dying cities, wounded cities; and cities of the past. Many are the evocations of cities in the past, usually a mythological or at best archaeological past. These come into their own in the second half of the seventeenth century with the growth of 'vedute' or views that were not specifically topographical; rather imaginary, fantastic. Clearly the imagery is profoundly classical; that is Hellenic and Roman; but the tone is often extravagant and capricious; indeed capricious is the right word because many of these painting can be described as Capricci.

The late seventeenth, early eighteenth century artists of the capriccio were Claude (his magical seaports) Panini, Ricci and later Piranesi.

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