Et in Arcadia ego

a-l-ancien-regime:

It is usually interpreted as a memento mori. In Greece, during Antiquity, Greeks lived in cities close to the sea, and led an urban life. Only Arcadians, in the middle of Peloponessos, lacked cities, were far from the sea, and led a shepherd life. For urban Greeks, especially during the Hellenistic era, Arcadia symbolized pure, rural, idyllic life, far from the city. 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. 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’. The former interpretation is now generally considered more likely; the ambiguity of the phrase is the subject of a famous essay by theart historian Erwin Panofsky . 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.