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Modified Date :
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ET IN ARCADIA EGO
The first pictorial
representation of "ET IN ARCADIA EGO" theme that was popularized in
16th-century Venice, now made more concrete and vivid by the inscription
"ET IN ARCADIA EGO", is (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri Guercino)'s (1591 -
1666) 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.
Nicolas Poussin's (1594 -
1665) own first version (Les Bergers d'Arcadie I) of the painting (now
in Chatsworth House, Chatsworth is close Shugborough) 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".
In 1685 it entered the collection of Louis XIV and over the next two
centuries inspired artists, writers and poets alike.
In 1751, Thomas Hudson
painted Lady Anson holding a partly rolled copy of an earlier
Poussin painting on the same theme known as Les Bergers d'Arcadie I.
The Duke of Devonshire owned the original Les Bergers d'Arcadie I
at the time. He lived at Chatsworth, quite close to Shugborough.
It was this painting
which would be copied in bas-relief by Louis Deprez in the 19th century
for the monument conceived by Chateaubriand in Rome at San Lorenzo in
Lucina to mark Poussin's burial place.
While the phrase "et in Arcadia ego" is a nominal phrase with no finite
verb, it is a perfectly acceptable construction 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.
Poussin's second biographer, Andre Felibien, interpreted Et In Arcadia
Ego as: "This inscription emphasizes the fact that the person buried in
this tomb has lived in Arcady".
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, 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 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.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Et in Arcadia ego". This article also uses materials from
http://priory-of-sion.com/psp/id17.html
,
http://et-in-arcadia-ego.mezzo-mondo.com/poussin-et-in-arcadia-ego.html.
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