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Et in Arcadia ego
Nicolas Poussin, 1637–1638
oil on canvas
185 × 121 cm, 72. 8 × 47. 6 in
Musée du Louvre

"Et in Arcadia ego" is a Latin phrase that most famously appears as the title of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). This page lists direct English Translations of common Latin phrases, such as veni vidi vici and Et cetera. Nicolas Poussin (15 June 1594 – 19 November 1665 was a French painter in the classical style They are pastoral paintings depicting idealized shepherds from classical antiquity, clustering around an austere tomb. Pastoral, as an adjective refers to the lifestyle of Shepherds and Pastoralists moving livestock around larger areas of land according to seasons and availability A shepherd is a person who tends to feeds or guards Sheep, especially in flocks Classical antiquity (also the classical era or classical period) is a broad term for a long period of cultural History centered on the Mediterranean For the New York prison see The Tombs. A Tomb is a repository for the remains of the dead. The more famous second version of the subject, measuring 185 by 121 centimetres (72. 8 x 47. 6 in), is in the Louvre, Paris, and also goes under the name "Les bergers d'Arcadie" ("The Arcadian Shepherds"). Inches redirects here To see the Les Savy Fav album see Inches. The Louvre Museum (Musée du Louvre located in Paris is the world's most visited art museum a historic monument and a national museum of France Paris (ˈpærɨs in English; in French) is the Capital of France and the country's largest city It has been highly influential in the history of art and more recently has been associated with the pseudohistory of the Priory of Sion myth popularised in the books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code. Pseudohistory is a term applied to texts which purport to be historical in nature but which depart from standard historiographical conventions in a way which undermines The Prieuré de Sion, translated from French as Priory of Sion, is the name of multiple groups both real and fictitious The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (retitled Holy Blood Holy Grail in the United States) is a controversial book by Michael Baigent The Da Vinci Code is a controversial mystery / detective Novel by US author Dan Brown, published in 2003 by Doubleday

Contents

Origin

The phrase is a memento mori, usually interpreted as "Even in Arcadia I exist", as if spoken by personified Death. Memento mori is a Latin phrase that may be translated as "Remember that you are mortal" "Remember you will die" "Remember that you must This page is about the proverbial land of Arcadia for the province in modern Greece see Arcadia; for other uses see Arcadia (disambiguation In English Death is often given the name the " Grim Reaper " and shown as a skeletal figure carrying a large Scythe, and wearing a midnight black gown robe However, Poussin's biographer, André Félibien, interpreted it to mean that "the person buried in this tomb has lived in Arcadia"; in other words, that the person too once enjoyed the pleasures of life on earth. André Félibien (May 1619 - 11 June 1695) sieur des Avaux et de Javercy, was a French chronicler of the arts and official court This reading was common in the 18th and 19th century. For example William Hazlitt wrote that Poussin "describes some shepherds wandering out in a morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription, 'I also was an Arcadian'. William Hazlitt ( 10 April 1778 &ndash 18 September 1830) was an English Writer remembered for his humanistic Essays and "[1] The former interpretation is now generally considered more likely; the ambiguity of the phrase is the subject of a famous essay by the art historian Erwin Panofsky (see References). Art history is the Academic study of objects of Art in their Historical development and stylistic contexts i Erwin Panofsky (also spelled Irwin Panofsky) ( 30 March 1892 - 14 March 1968) was a German Jewish Art historian who emigrated Either way, the sentiment was meant to set up an ironic contrast between the shadow of death and the usual idle merriment that the nymphs and swains of ancient Arcadia were thought to embody. Irony is a literary or Rhetorical device, in which there is an incongruity or Discordance between what one says or does and what one means or In Greek mythology, a nymph is any member of a large class of mythological entities in human female form Swain is a traditional English Surname derived ultimately from the Old Norse Personal name Sveinn ( Sven, Sweyn meaning

Guercino's version of the subject.
Guercino's version of the subject. Et in Arcadia ego (also known as The Arcadian Shepherds) is a painting by the Italian Baroque artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Guercino

The first appearance of a tomb with a memorial inscription (to Daphnis) amid the idyllic settings of Arcadia appears in Virgil's Eclogues V 42 ff. In Greek mythology, Daphnis (from Gk daphne "laurel" or "bay-tree" was a son of Hermes and a Sicilian Nymph Publius Vergilius Maro ( October 15, 70 BCE &ndash September 21, 19 BCE later called Virgilius, and known in English as Virgil or The Bucolics (also called the Eclogues) is the first of the three major works of the Latin Poet Virgil. Virgil took the idealized Sicilian rustics that had first appeared in the Idylls of Theocritus and set them in the primitive Greek district of Arcadia (see Eclogues VII and X). Theocritus ( Greek: Θεόκριτος the creator of Ancient Greek Bucolic Poetry, flourished in the 3rd century BC The idea was taken up anew in the circle of Lorenzo de' Medici in the 1460s and 1470s, during the Florentine Renaissance. Lorenzo de' Medici (January 1 1449 &ndash 9 April 1492 was an Italian statesman and de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic during the Italian Renaissance The Italian Renaissance began the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement in Europe that spanned the period from the end of the 14th In his pastoral work Arcadia (1504), Jacopo Sannazaro fixed the Early Modern perception of Arcadia as a lost world of idyllic bliss, remembered in regretful dirges. Jacopo Sannazaro or Sannazzaro ( 28 July 1458 - April 27, 1530) was an Italian poet humanist and epigrammist In the 1590s, Sir Philip Sidney circulated copies of his romance The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, which soon got into print. Sir Philip Sidney ( November 30, 1554 &ndash October 17, 1586) became one of the Elizabethan Age's most prominent figures The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, also known simply as The Arcadia is by far Sir Philip Sidney 's most ambitious work The first pictorial representation of the familiar memento mori theme that was popularized in 16th-century Venice, now made more concrete and vivid by the inscription ET IN ARCADIA EGO, is Guercino's version, painted between 1618 and 1622 (in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome), in which the inscription gains force from the prominent presence of a skull in the foreground, beneath which the words are carved. Et in Arcadia ego (also known as The Arcadian Shepherds) is a painting by the Italian Baroque artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Guercino The Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, or National Gallery of Ancient Art, is an Art gallery in Rome, Italy, Skull symbolism is the attachment of symbolic meaning to the human Skull.

Poussin's 1627 version of the Arcadian Shepherds, in Chatsworth House, depicting a different tomb with the same inscription.
Poussin's 1627 version of the Arcadian Shepherds, in Chatsworth House, depicting a different tomb with the same inscription. Chatsworth House is a large Country house at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, England 3½ miles north east of Bakewell.

Poussin's own first version of the painting (now in Chatsworth House) was probably commissioned as a reworking of Guercino's version. Chatsworth House is a large Country house at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, England 3½ miles north east of Bakewell. It is in a far more Baroque style than the later version, characteristic of Poussin's early work. Baroque art redirects here Please disambiguate such links to Baroque painting, Baroque sculpture, etc In the Chatsworth painting the shepherds are actively discovering the half-hidden and overgrown tomb, and are reading the inscription with curious expressions. The shepherdess, standing at the left, is posed in sexually suggestive fashion, very different from her austere counterpart in the later version. The later version has a far more geometric composition and the figures are much more contemplative. The mask-like face of the shepherdess conforms to the conventions of the Classical "Greek profile". Meaning: The most important difference between the two versions is that in the latter version, one of the two shepherds recognizes the shadow of his companion on the tomb and circumscribes the silhouette with his finger. According to an ancient tradition (see Pliny the Elder, nat. Hist. XXXV 5, 15), this is the moment in which the art of painting is first discovered. Thus, the shepherd's shadow is the first image in art history. But the shadow on the tomb is also a symbol of death (in the first version symbolized by a skull on the top of the tomb). The meaning of this highly intricate composition seems to be that the discovery of art is an answer of humankind to the shocking discovery of mortality. However, death’s claim to rule even Arcadia is challenged by art (symbolized by the beautifully dressed maiden), who must insist that she was discovered in Arcadia too, and that she is the legitimate ruler everywhere, whilst death usurps its power. The duty of art in the face of death, and her raison d’être, is to represent absent loved ones, console anxieties, evoke and balance emotions, break isolation, and allow communication about the unutterable.

The Shugborough relief, adapted from an engraving of Poussin's second version.
The Shugborough relief, adapted from an engraving of Poussin's second version.

Sculpted versions

The undated mid-eighteenth-century marble bas-relief part of the "Shepherd's Monument, a garden feature at Shugborough House, Staffordshire, England, beneath it is the encoded "Shugborough House inscription", as yet undeciphered. Shugborough is a country estate in Great Haywood, near Stafford, England, on the north-eastern edge of Cannock Chase. Hall]] in Staffordshire, England has in its grounds an 18th-century Monument commissioned by Admiral George Anson 1st Baron Anson, bearing an Inscription [2] The reversed composition shows that it was copied from an engraving, the compositions of which are commonly reversed because direct copies to the plate produce mirror images on printing. Engraving is the practice of incising a design onto a hard usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it

In 1832 another relief was sculpted as part of the monument marking Poussin's tomb in Rome, on which it appears beneath a bust of the artist. [1] In the words of the art historian Richard Verdi, it appears as if the shepherds are contemplating "their own author's death. "[3]

In conjunction with John Andrew, the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay created a marble carving entitled "Et in Arcadia ego" in 1976. Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE, ( 28 October, 1925 - 27 March, 2006) was a Scottish Poet, Writer, Artist Carved below the title are the words "After Nicholas Poussin" The main part of the carving shows a military tank in a pastoral landscape.

Conspiracy theories

While the phrase "et in Arcadia ego" is a nominal phrase with no finite verb, it is a perfectly acceptable construction in Latin. In grammatical theory, a noun phrase (abbreviated NP) is a Phrase whose head is a Noun or a Pronoun, optionally accompanied Pseudohistorians unaware of that aspect of Latin grammar have concluded that the sentence is incomplete, missing a verb, and have speculated that it represents some esoteric message concealed in a (possibly anagrammatic) code. Pseudohistory is a term applied to texts which purport to be historical in nature but which depart from standard historiographical conventions in a way which undermines In The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, under the false impression that "et in Arcadia ego" was not a proper Latin sentence, proposed that it is an anagram for I! Tego arcana Dei, which translates to "Begone! I keep God's secrets", suggesting that the tomb contains the remains of Jesus or another important Biblical figure. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (retitled Holy Blood Holy Grail in the United States) is a controversial book by Michael Baigent An anagram ( Greek anagramma 'letters written anew' passive participle of ana- 'again' + gramma 'letter' is a type of Word play Jesus of Nazareth (7–2 BC / BCE —26–36 AD / CE) Etymology According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word bible is from Latin biblia, traced from the same word through Medieval Latin and Late Latin They claimed that Poussin was privy to this secret and that he depicted an actual location. The authors did not explain why the tomb depicted in the second version of the painting should contain this secret while the distinctly different one in the first version presumably does not. Ultimately, this view is dismissed by art historians. Art history is the Academic study of objects of Art in their Historical development and stylistic contexts i

In their book The Tomb of God, Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger, developing these ideas, have theorized that the Latin sentence misses the word "sum". The Tomb of God (subtitled The Body of Jesus and the Solution to a 2000-year-old Mystery) published in 1996, is a speculative non-fiction book by They argue that the extrapolated phrase Et in Arcadia ego sum could be an anagram for Arcam Dei Tango Iesu, which would mean "I touch the tomb of God — Jesus". An anagram ( Greek anagramma 'letters written anew' passive participle of ana- 'again' + gramma 'letter' is a type of Word play Their argument assumes that:

  1. the Latin phrase is incomplete
  2. the extrapolation as to the missing words is correct
  3. the sentence, once completed, is intended to be an anagram
  4. Andrews and Schellenberger selected the proper anagram out of the thousands of possibilities.

Andrews and Schellenberger also claim that the tomb portrayed is one at Les Pontils, near Rennes-le-Château[4]. Rennes-le-Château ( Rènnas del Castèl in Occitan) is a small Medieval castle village and a commune in the Aude However, Franck Marie in 1974 and Michel Vallet (aka "Pierre Jarnac") in 1985 had already concluded that this tomb was begun in 1903 by the owner of the land, Jean Galibert, who buried his wife and grandmother there in a simple grave. Their bodies were exhumed and reinterred elsewhere after the land was sold to Louis Lawrence, an American from Connecticut who had emigrated to the area. He buried his mother and grandmother in the grave and built the stone sepulchre. Marie and Vallet had both interviewed Adrien Bourrel, Lawrence's son, who witnessed the construction of the sepulchre in 1933 when a young boy. Pierre Plantard, the creator of the Priory of Sion mythology, tried to argue that the sepulchre at Les Pontils was a "prototype" for Poussin's painting, but it was situated directly opposite a farmhouse (behind the foliage) and was not in the "middle of nowhere" in the French countryside, as is commonly assumed. Pierre Athanase Marie Plantard ( March 18, 1920 &ndash February 3, 2000) was a French draughtsman, best known for being The sepulchre has since been demolished.

Other uses

Notes

  1. ^ Hazlitt, W, Why the Arts are not Progressive, Complete Writings, vol 18, p. 9-10.
  2. ^ Shugborough: "The Shepherd's Monument"
  3. ^ http://assets.cambridge.org/052164/0040/sample/0521640040WSC00.pdf Warwick, G. & Scott, K. , Commemorating Poussin: Reception and Interpretation of the Artist, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 9
  4. ^ Images of the Les Pontile tomb

References

External links

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