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NICOLAS POUSSIN - ET IN ARCADIA EGO (THE
SHEPHERDS OF ARCADIA)
.jpg)
Public domain, via
Wikimedia Commons
Et in Arcadia ego (The Shepherds of Arcadia),
2nd version
1637-1638 |
- Et in Arcadia ego (The Arcadian Shepherds) is a 1637-1638 painting by Classical painter Nicolas Poussin.
- It depicts a pastoral scene with idealized shepherds from classical antiquity, and a woman, possibly a shepherdess, gathered around an austere tomb that includes the Latin inscription
Et in Arcadia ego which is translated to 'Even in Arcadia, there am I'
or 'Also in Arcadia am I,' or 'I too was in Arcadia.'
- Poussin also painted another version of the subject in 1627 under the same title.
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A tomb with a memorial inscription (to Daphnis) amid the idyllic settings of Arcadia is first described in Virgil's Eclogues V 42 ff. Virgil took the idealized Sicilian rustics included in the Idylls of Theocritus and set them in the primitive Greek region of Arcadia (see Eclogues VII and X). The idea was taken up anew in the circle of Lorenzo de' Medici in the 1460s and 1470s, during the Florentine Renaissance.
(Wikipedia)
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