The Last of its Kind

“What is décadence? It is the keenest sense of organic connection with the monumental legacy of the high culture of the past, along with the painfully proud awareness that we are the last of its kind.”

Viacheslav Ivanov and M. O. Gershenson, Perepiska iz Dvukh Uglov, 1921

quoted by Andrei Ariev in The Intelligentsia without Revolution: The Culture of the Silver Age

Francisco Goya - The Dog - 1819

J. M. W. Turner - Three Seascapes - 1827

J. A. Whistler - Colour Scheme for the dining room of Aubrey House - 1873

Order and Beauty

"There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure."
Charles Baudelaire, l'Invitation au voyage, 1857

Ambrogio Lorenzetti - Effetti Del Buon Governo - 1337/1340

Elisàr Von Kupffer - Die Klarwelt Der Seligen - 1923 

Henry Darger - The Story Of The Vivian Girls - 1930/1973

Virtuous State

"The love of variety is a vicious, corrupt, and unnatural taste and could not prevail in any great degree in a simple and virtuous state of society."

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798

Haus KLR built by Jutta Klare and renovated by Archequipe - Cologne - 1980 & 2013

Via Dezeen

Adolf Loos - Villa Moller - Vienna - 1927/28

 Aldo Rossi - Scuola Elementare De Amicis - Broni - 1969/1971