Happened for the
full month with a lot of samples and interests about 'too' usage, and
apparently today in TheFreeDictionary article. You see this here bellow, and an
additional my post in LangLing in this link:
Either way, the
sentiment is meant to set up an image contrast between the shadow of death and
the utopian merriment as if the nymphs and swains of ancient Arcadia are
thought to embody, although that the meaning of the intricate composition
seems to be that the discovery of the art has been the creative response of
humankind to the shocking discovery of mortality for the difference in the
latter.
Accordingly, that death claims to rule even Arcadia is challenged by art, whilst death only
usurps its power, is the raison detre to recall with the
difference in the former.
"Et in Arcadia ego" is a Latin phrase that most famously appears as the
title of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). They are pastoral paintings depicting idealized shepherds from classical antiquity, clustering around an austere tomb. The more famous second version of the subject, measuring 87
by 120 centimetres (34.25 x 47.24 in), is in the Louvre, Paris, and also goes under the name "Les bergers
d'Arcadie" ("The Arcadian Shepherds").
Origin
The translation of the phrase is "Even in Arcadia, there am I". The usual
interpretation is that "I" refers to death, and "Arcadia"
means a utopian land. It would thus be a memento mori. During Antiquity, Greeks lived
in cities close to the sea, and led an urban life. Only Arcadians, in the
middle of the Peloponnese, lacked cities, were far from the
sea, and led a shepherd life. Thus for urban Greeks, especially during the
Hellenistic era, Arcadia symbolized pure, rural, idyllic life, far from the
city.
However, Poussin's biographer, André Félibien, interpreted the phrase to mean
that "the person buried in this tomb lived in Arcadia"; in other
words, that the person too once enjoyed the pleasures of life on earth. This
reading was common in the 18th and 19th centuries. 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'."[1]
The former interpretation ("ego" referring to
death) 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). 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.
Guercino's version of the subject.
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. 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). The idea was taken up anew
in the circle of Lorenzo de' Medici in the 1460s and 1470s, during
the Florentine Renaissance.
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. 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.
Poussin's 1627 version of the Arcadian Shepherds, in Chatsworth House, depicting a different tomb with
the same inscription.
Poussin's own first version of the painting (now in Chatsworth House) was probably commissioned as a
reworking of Guercino's version. It is in a far more Baroque style than the later version,
characteristic of Poussin's early work. 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".
Interpretation
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, from prehistory onward, the discovery of art has been the creative
response of humankind to the shocking discovery of mortality. Thus, 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 only usurps its
power. In the face of death, art's duty—indeed, her raison d’être--is to recall absent loved ones,
console anxieties, evoke and reconcile conflicting emotions, surmount
isolation, and facilitate the expression of the unutterable.[2]
The
Shugborough relief, adapted from an engraving of Poussin's second version.
Sculpted versions
The undated mid-eighteenth-century marble bas-relief is part
of the Shepherds Monument, a garden feature at Shugborough House,
Staffordshire, England. Beneath it is the cryptic Shugborough inscription, as
yet undeciphered.[3] The reversed composition suggests
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.
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.[4] In the words of the art historian
Richard Verdi, it appears as if the shepherds are contemplating "their own
author's death."[5]
In conjunction with John Andrew, the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay created a marble carving entitled
"Et in Arcadia ego" in 1976. Carved below the title are the words
"After Nicholas Poussin". The main part of the carving shows a
military tank in a pastoral landscape.
Proposed hidden meanings
While the phrase "et in arcadia ego" is a nominal phrase with no
finite verb, it is a well-formed construction because substantive and copular
verb omission is perfectly acceptable in Latin. 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. 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. 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.
In their book The Tomb of God,[6]
Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger, developing these ideas, have theorized
that the Latin sentence misses the word "sum". 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". Their argument presupposes
that:
- the Latin phrase is incomplete
- the extrapolation as to the missing words is correct
- the sentence, once completed, is intended to be an anagram
- Andrews and Schellenberger selected the proper anagram out of numerous possibilities.
Andrews and Schellenberger also claim that the tomb portrayed
is one at Les Pontils, near Rennes-le-Château.[7] However, Franck Marie in 1978[8] and Pierre Jarnac in 1985[9][10] 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 Jarnac 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. Plantard also claimed that the phrase "Et In
Arcadia Ego" had been the motto on his Family Coat-of-Arms for
generations. The sepulchre was demolished in 1988 by the owner with the
permission of the local authorities.[11]
Other appearances
- Et in Arcadia ego (the German Auch ich in Arkadien! is used) is the motto of Italian Journey (1816−17) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.[12]
- Et in Arcadia ego is the title of section 295, Volume II, Part Two ("The Wanderer and his Shadow"), of Friedrich Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human (1880). The passage describes a pastoral evening scene in the high mountains, finishing with the lines: "Unconsciously, as if nothing could be more natural, you peopled this pure, clear world of light (which had no trace of yearning, of expectancy, of looking forward or backward) with Greek heroes. You felt it all as Poussin and his school felt it, at once heroic and idyllic. So individual men too have lived, constantly feeling themselves in the world and the world in themselves, and among them one of the greatest men, the inventor of a heroico-idyllic form of philosophy, Epicurus."[13]
- Et in Arcadia Ego is the title of Book One of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited in which the narrator, Charles Ryder, describes his room decorated with a skull bearing the phrase.[14]
- The phrase appears in Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian when the character Tobin informs The Kid that the phrase is the name Judge Holden has ascribed to his rifle, noting "A reference to the lethal in it."[15]
- Ben Okri's In Arcadia follows a filmcrew shooting a documentary about Nicolas Poussin's painting.[16]
- Et in Arcadia ego was the originally planned title of Tom Stoppard's play, Arcadia, in which the phrase is used erroneously by one character (whose misuse is acknowledged by two other characters). The phrase also reflects the themes of the play itself.[17]
- "Et in Arcadia Ego" is also the title of a work by the Czech science fiction writer Simon Sedivak, where Arcadia is described as a planet.
- Arcadia was the name of Duran Duran's spin off band formed in 1985 by Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and Roger Taylor reportedly because of the inscription on this painting.[18]
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