Et in Arcadia ego
‘I too am in Arcadia’ (Latin). Arcadia was celebrated in ancient times (by the Roman poet Virgil, among others) as a rural paradise where one could find innocence and true understanding. This meaning persisted throughout western civilisation until modern times. The original Arcadia was a central area of the Peloponnese in Greece. It is actually a mountainous and dangerous region but a people who exhibited generosity, simplicity and contentedness supposedly inhabited it in ancient times. The point of the motto Et in Arcadia ego is that Death is speaking it. Even in the happiest times, Death is saying, decay and disaster are not far away. It seems that the phrase dates back to the early Renaissance (the fifteenth century) as it has not been traced any earlier; but it had a lively existence in many paintings and writings of that period. Perhaps the motto’s most celebrated appearance is in a painting of 1655 by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), where various puzzled Arcadian characters are tracing the barely-visible words on a tomb. Poussin had earlier (1627) painted an even more explicit version of the theme in which a skull can just be seen on the tomb. An earlier painting still (1622), and attributed to Giovanni Francesco Barbieri known as Il Guercino (1591-1666), shows two shepherds looking at a skull on a stone pedestal on which the words are inscribed. Charles soon comes to possess such a skull or memento mori - what his cousin Jasper calls a ‘peculiarly noisome object’. It has the motto inscribed on its forehead.
(Cliffe)
Not so much of a Paradise, as it happens.