• StanCall
• Contents
• Egloga Tercera
• Egloga Primera
• Et in Arcadia Ego
• Versions of Orpheus
• Venus and Adonis
• Sonnet XIII
• History Scrapbook

Arcadian Shepherds

Probably the best known of all Poussin's paintings, The Arcadian Shepherds depicts the same theme as the early Titianesque canvas at Chatsworth but in a wholly different mood. Whereas the early picture portrayed the figures in a sudden and dramatic confrontation with death, the Louvre painting shows them solemnly meditating upon it. In keeping with this more philosophical approach to the theme, the skull included in the Chatsworth picture has been omitted and the inscription - Et in Arcadia ego or Even in Arcadia, [there] am I - is literally allowed to speak for itself. As Panofsky notes in his classic study of this picture, the absence of the skull eventually led these words to be attributed not to death itself but to the inhabitant of the tomb, with the result that the Arcadians are not so much warned of an implacable future as they are immersed in mellow meditation of a beautiful past.

The scene is one from which virtually all movement has been eliminated. Three shepherds and a shepherdess appear welded into a single group which follows the contours of the tomb, as though already confined by its controlling law. As one figure kneels to decipher the inscription, his shadow falls prophetically upon the tomb. Another transmits the tomb's message to a shepherdess leaning on his shoulder; while the standing shepherd at the left contemplates the meaning of these words with an air of gentle resignation.

The composition is of the utmost simp1icity, which may explain why the Louvre picture has long been regarded as the quintessence of Poussin's art. Poses are stilled, action is frozen and the scene is set in a timeless context which contains nothing to engage or divert the eye. The colour is pure, matt and largely confined to the primary hues; and the landscape is reduced to a bare and arid terrain bounded including only a few isolated trees. The setting is presumably intended to enhance the presence of the landscape and the picture's deeper meaning.

Erwin Panofsky

On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau, Philosophy and History

Essays presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. R. Klibansky and H.J.Patton, Oxford, 1936, 223 - 254.

Panofsky discusses the origins of the Latin tag Et in Arcadia Ego, noting how its current, normal sense [I too have enjoyed unsurpassed happiness, which is enduringly alive in my memory] is not what was originally conveyed. To recover the sense that the tag enjoyed for Poussin's painting, Panosfky traces the background of pastoral to Virgil's Bucolics, above all, and defines the nature of Arcadia as the ideal place (locus amoenus), the visionary and literary realm of harmony and natural sweetness. In Virgil there is manifest the tension that will come to characterise Renaissance pastoral: even in Arcadia there existed the two fundamental tragedies of human life, inextricably connected with one another: frustrated love and death. Within that major tension, some of the recurring themes of pastoral coexist: e.g. disfigured nature, whereby nature's own laws are reversed under the pressure of suffering, and the good things of nature are withheld, to be replaced by things of ugliness. The elegiac mood of much Renaissance pastoral can be exemplified by Sannazzaro; as he shaped and extended the Arcadian vision of ideal happiness and plenitude, then the deeper, inevitable tragedies of Arcadia came to be felt more acutely.