Et in Arcadia ego

Giuseppe Marchi after Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of Mrs Bouverie and Mrs Crewe
(Et in Arcadia ego)
1770
mezzotint
British Museum

In 1769 Sir Joshua Reynolds showed to his friend Dr. Johnson his latest picture: the double portrait of Mrs. Bouverie and Mrs. Crewe, still to be seen in Crewe Hall in England.  It shows the two lovely ladies seated before a tombstone and sentimentalizing over its inscription: one points out the text to the other, who meditates thereon in the then fashionable pose of Tragic Muses and Melancholias.  The text of the inscription reads: "Et in Arcadia ego."

"What can this mean?" exclaimed Dr. Johnson. "It seems very nonsensical – I am in Arcadia."  "The King could have told you," replied Sir Joshua. "He saw it yesterday and said at once: 'Oh, there is a tombstone in the background: Ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia.'" 

To the modern reader the angry discomfiture of Dr. Johnson is very puzzling.  But no less puzzling is the quick understanding of George III, who instantly grasped the purport of the Latin phrase but interpreted it in a manner dissimilar to that which seems self-evident to most of us.  In contrast to Dr. Johnson, we are no longer stumped by the phrase Et in Arcadia ego.  But in contrast to George III, we are accustomed to reading a very different meaning into it.  For us, the formula Et in Arcadia ego has come to be synonymous with such paraphrases as "Et tu in Arcadia vixisti,"  "I, too, was born in Arcadia," "Ego fui in Arcadia," "Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren," "Moi aussi je fus pasteur en Arcadie"; and all these and many similar versions amount to what Mrs. Felicia Hemans expressed in the immortal words: "I, too, shepherds, in Arcadia dwelt."  They conjure up the retrospective vision of an unsurpassable happiness, enjoyed in the past, unattainable ever after, yet enduringly alive in the memory; a bygone happiness ended by death; and not, as George III's paraphrase implies, a present happiness menaced by death.  

I shall try to show that this royal rendering – "Death is even in Arcadia" – represents a grammatically correct, in fact, the only grammatically correct, interpretation of the Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego, and that our modern reading of its message – "I, too, was born, or lived, in Arcady" – is in reality a mistranslation.  Then I shall try to show that this mistranslation, indefensible though it is from a philological point of view, yet did not come about by "pure ignorance" but, on the contrary, expressed and sanctioned, at the expense of grammar but in the interest of truth, a basic change in interpretation.  Finally, I shall try to fix the ultimate responsibility for this change, which was of a paramount importance for modern literature, not on a man of letters, but on a great painter. 

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Et in Arcadia ego
ca. 1621-23
oil on canvas
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome

[It is in a painting by Guercino that we first encounter a visual rendering of the Death in Arcady theme accompanied by the phrase Et in Arcadia ego.]  There are reasons to believe that the subject was of special interest to Giulio Rospigliosi (later Pope Clement IX), whose family palace, which housed Guido Reni's Aurora, must have been frequently visited by Guercino when he composed his own, more modern Aurora in the Casino Ludovisi; and Giulio Rospigliosi  – a humanist, a lover of the arts, and a poet of no mean merits – may even be the inventor of the famous phrase, which is not classical and does not seem to occur in literature before it made its appearance in Guercino's picture.  What, then, is the literal sense of the phrase?

As was mentioned at the beginning, we are now inclined to translate it as "I, too, was born, or lived, in Arcady." That is to say, we assume that the et means "too" and refers to ego, and we further assume that the unexpressed verb stands in the past tense; we thus attribute the whole phrase to a defunct inhabitant of Arcady.  All these assumptions are incompatible with the rules of Latin grammar.  The phrase Et in Arcadia ego is one of those elliptical sentences like Summum jus summa iniuria, E pluribus unum, Nequid nimis or Sic semper tyrannis, in which the verb has to be supplied by the reader.  This unexpressed verb must therefore be unequivocally suggested by the words given, and this means that it can never be a preterite.  It is possible to suggest a subjunctive as in Nequid nimis ("Let there never be done too much") or Sic semper tyrannis ("May this be the fate of all tyrants"); it is also possible, though fairly unusual, to suggest a future as in Neptune's famous Quos ego ("These I shall deal with"); but it is not possible to suggest a past tense.  Even more important: the adjectival et invariably refers to the noun or pronoun directly following it (as in Et tu, Brute), and this means that it belongs, in our case, not to ego but to Arcadia; it is amusing to observe that some modern writers accustomed to the now familiar interpretation but blessed with an inbred feeling for good Latin – for instance, Balzac, the German Romanticist C.J. Weber, and the excellent Miss Dorothy Sayers – instinctively misquote the Et in Arcadia ego into Et ego in Arcadia.  The correct translation of the phrase in its orthodox form is, therefore, not "I, too, was born, or lived, in Arcady," but: "Even in Arcady there am I," from which we must conclude that the speaker is not a deceased Arcadian shepherd or shepherdess but Death in person.  In short, King George III's interpretation is, grammatically, absolutely right.  And with reference to Guercino's painting, it is also absolutely right from a visual point of view. 

In this painting two Arcadian shepherds are checked in their wanderings by the sudden sight, not of a funerary monument but of a huge human skull that lies on a moldering piece of masonry, and receives the attention of a fly and a mouse, popular symbols of decay and all-devouring time.  Incised on the masonry are the words Et in Arcadia ego, and it is unquestionably by the skull that they are supposed to be pronounced; an old description of the picture mistakenly but understandably even places them on a scroll issuing from the skull's mouth.  The skull, now, was and is the accepted symbol of Death personified, as is borne out by the very fact that the English language refers to it, not as a "dead man's head," but as a "death's-head."  The speaking death's-head was thus a common feature in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art and literature and is even alluded to by Falstaff (Henry VI, second part, ii, 4) when he answers Doll Tearsheet's well-intentioned warnings as to his conduct: "Peace, good Doll, do not speak like a death's-head; do not bid me remember mine end."

This "remember mine end" is precisely the message of Guercino's painting.  It conveys a warning rather than sweet, sad memories.  There is little or nothing elegiac about it, and when we try to trace the iconographic antecedents of the composition, we find them in such moralistic representations as the renderings of the Legend of the Three Quick and the Three Dead (known to all from the Camposanto at Pisa), where three young knights, setting out for a hunt, come upon three corpses that rise from their coffins and warn the elegant young men against their thoughtless enjoyment of life.  As these mediaeval dandies are stopped by the coffins, so are Guercino's Arcadians stopped by the skull; the old description just mentioned even speaks of them as "gay frolickers stumbling over a death's-head."  In both cases Death catches youth by the throat, so to speak, and "bids it remember the end."  In short, Guercino's picture turns out to be a mediaeval memento mori in humanistic disguise – a favorite concept of Christian moral theology shifted to the ideal milieu of classical and classicizing pastorals. 

We happen to know that Sir Joshua Reynolds not only knew but even sketched Guercino's painting.  It is a fair assumption that he remembered this very painting when he included the Et in Arcadia ego motif in his portrait of Mrs. Crewe and Mrs. Bouverie; and this firsthand connection with the very source of the phrase may account for the fact that its grammatically correct interpretation (as "Even in Arcadia, I, Death, hold sway"), while long forgotten on the Continent, remained familiar to the circle of Reynolds and, later on, became part of what may be termed a specifically English or "insular" tradition  – a tradition which tended to retain the idea of a memento mori.  We have seen that Reynolds himself adhered to the correct interpretation of the Latin phrase and that George III understood it at once.  

Thomas Kirk after Giovanni Battista Cipriani
Shepherds in Arcadia
1788
etching and engraving
British Museum

In addition, we have an Et in Arcadia ego composition by Giovanni Battista Cipriani, born in Florence but active in England from the end of his apprenticeship up to his death in 1785, which shows the coat-of-arms of Death, the skull and bones, surmounted by the inscription "Ancora in Arcadia morte," which means: "Even in Arcady there is Death," precisely as King George had translated it.  . . .  However, Cipriani, while faithful to the "insular" tradition in the translation of the Latin phrase, drew from another source for his pictorial composition.  A thoroughgoing eclectic, he expanded the landscape and added sheep, dogs, and fragments of classical buildings; he increased the personnel by seven figures of a, generally speaking, Raphaelesque character (five of them women); and he replaced Guercino's artless masonry and actual death's head by an elaborately classicizing tomb, with the skull and bones carved upon it in relief.  In doing all this, this rather indifferent artist shows himself familiar with the innovations of that one man whose pictures mark the turning point in the history of the Et in Arcadia ego theme: the great French painter Nicolas Poussin.

Nicolas Poussin
The Arcadian Shepherds
ca. 1629-30
oil on canvas
Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth, Derbyshire

Poussin had come to Rome in 1624 or 1625, one or two years after Guercino had left it.  And a few years later (presumably about 1630) he produced the earlier of his two Et in Arcadia ego compositions, now in the Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth.  Being a Classicist (though in a very special sense), and probably conversant with Virgil, Poussin revised Guercino's composition by adding the Arcadian river god Alpheus and by transforming the decaying masonry into a classical sarcophagus inscribed with the Et in Arcadia ego; moreover, he emphasized the amorous implications of the Arcadian milieu by the addition of a shepherdess to Guercino's two shepherds.  But in spite of these improvements, Poussin's picture does not conceal its derivation from Guercino's.  In the first place, it retains to some extent the element of drama and surprise: the shepherds approach as a group from the left and are unexpectedly stopped by the tomb.  In the second place, there is still the actual skull, placed upon the sarcophagus above the word Arcadia, though it has become quite small and inconspicuous and fails to attract the attention of the shepherds who – a telling symptom of Poussin's intellectualistic inclinations – seem to be more intensely fascinated by the inscription than they are shocked by the death's-head.  In the third place, the picture still conveys, though far less obtrusively than Guercino's, a moral or admonitory message.  It formed, originally, the counterpart of a Midas washing at the source of the River Pactolus [directly below], the iconographically essential figure of the river god Pactolus accounting for the inclusion of its counterpart, the less necessary river god Alpheus, in the Arcadia picture.  

Nicolas Poussin
Midas washing at the source of the River Pactolus
ca. 1629-30
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In conjunction, the two compositions thus teach a twofold lesson, one warning against a mad desire for riches at the expense of the more real values of life, the other against a thoughtless enjoyment of pleasures soon to be ended.  The phrase Ego et Arcadia ego can still be understood to be voiced by Death personified, and can still be translated as "Even in Arcady, I, Death, hold sway," without being out of harmony with what is visible in the painting itself. 

Nicolas Poussin
The Arcadian Shepherds
c1635-36
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Nicolas Poussin
The Arcadian Shepherds (detail)
ca. 1635-36
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

After another five or six years, however, Poussin produced a second and final version of the Et in Arcadia ego theme, the famous picture in the Louvre.  And in this painting – no longer a momento mori in classical garb paired with a cave avaritiam in classical garb, but standing by itself – we can observe a radical break with the mediaeval, moralizing tradition.  The element of drama and surprise has disappeared.  Instead of two or three Arcadians approaching from the left in a group, we have four, symmetrically arranged on either side of a sepulchral monument.  Instead of being checked in their progress by an unexpected and terrifying phenomenon, they are absorbed in calm discussion and pensive contemplation.  One of the shepherds kneels on the ground as though rereading the inscription for himself.  The second seems to discuss it with a lovely girl who thinks about it in a quiet, thoughtful attitude.  The third seems trajected into a sympathetic, brooding melancholy.  The form of the tomb is simplified into a plain rectangular block, no longer foreshortened but placed parallel to the picture plane, and the death's-head is eliminated altogether.

Here, then, we have a basic change in interpretation.  The Arcadians are not so much warned of an implacable future as they are immersed in mellow meditation on a beautiful past.  They seem to think less of themselves than of the human being buried in the tomb – a human being that once enjoyed the pleasures which they now enjoy, and whose monument "bids them remember their end" only in so far as it evokes the memory of one who had been what they are.  In short, Poussin's Louvre picture no longer shows a dramatic encounter with Death but a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality.  We are confronted with a change from thinly veiled moralism to undisguised elegiac sentiment.

When read according to the rules of Latin grammar ("Even in Arcady, there am I"), the phrase had been consistent and easily intelligible as long as the words could be attributed to a death's-head and as long as the shepherds were suddenly and frighteningly interrupted in their walk.  This is manifestly true for Guercino's painting, where the death's-head is the most prominent feature of the composition and where its psychological impact is not as yet weakened by the competition of a beautiful sarcophagus or tomb.  But it is also true, if in a considerably lesser degree, of Poussin's earlier picture, where the skull, though smaller and already subordinated to the newly introduced sarcophagus, is still in evidence, and where the idea of sudden interruption is retained. 

When facing the Louvre painting, however, the beholder finds it difficult to accept the inscription in its literal, grammatically correct, significance.  In the absence of a death's-head, the ego in the phrase Et in Arcadia ego must now be taken to refer to the tomb itself.  And though a "speaking tomb" was not unheard of in the funerary poetry of the time, . . . it is infinitely more natural to ascribe the words, not to the tomb but to the person buried therein.  Such is the case with ninety-nine per cent of all epitaphs, . . . and Poussin's Louvre picture suggests this familiar interpretation – which, as it were, projects the message of the Latin phrase from the present into the past – all the more forcibly as the behavior of the figures no longer expresses surprise and dismay but quiet, reminiscent meditation.

Thus Poussin himself, while making no verbal change in the inscription, invites, almost compels, the beholder to mistranslate it by relating the ego to a dead person instead of to the tomb, by connecting the et with ego instead of with Arcadia, and by supplying the missing verb in the form of a vixi or fui instead of a sum.  The development of his pictorial vision had outgrown the significance of the literary formula, and we may say that those who, under the impact of the Louvre picture, decided to render the phrase Et in Arcadia ego as "I, too, lived in Arcady," rather than as "Even in Arcady, there am I," did violence to the Latin grammar but justice to the new meaning of Poussin's composition. 

formerly attributed to Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with Arcadian Shepherds
ca. 1627
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

As to Mrs. Felicia Hemans, the motto superscribed on her poem ("I, too, shepherd, in Arcadia dwelt") appears to confuse Poussin's Louvre picture with one or more of its variations.  In the poem itself Mrs. Hemans follows in the footsteps of Sannazaro and Diderot in assuming that the occupant of the tomb is a young girl:                 

                                                 

                                                 Was some gentle kindred maid

                                                 In that grave with dirges laid?

                                                 Some fair creature, with the tone

                                                 Of whose voice a joy is gone? 

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe
I too was in Arcady
1801
etching
British Museum

In a strangely attractive engraving by a German Romanticist named Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, who had a trick of constructing wondrous jungles and forests by magnifying grass, herbs or cabbage leaves to the size of bushes and trees, the tomb and its inscription (here, correctly, Et in Arcadia ego although the legend of the engraving consists of the erroneous "Auch ich war in Arkadien") serve only to emphasize the gentle absorption of two lovers in one another.  In Goethe's use of the phrase Et in Arcadia ego, finally, the idea of death has been entirely eliminated.  He uses it, in an abbreviated version ("Auch ich in Arkadien") as a motto for his famous account of his blissful journey to Italy, so that it merely means: "I, too, was in the land of joy and beauty."

Jean-Honoré Fragonard
The Tomb
ca. 1775
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Fragonard, on the other hand, retained the idea of death; but he reversed the original moral.  He depicted two cupids, probably spirits of departed lovers, clasped in an embrace within a broken sarcophagus while other, smaller cupids flutter about and a friendly genius illumines the scene with the light of a nuptial torch.  Here the development has run full cycle.  To Guercino's "Even in Arcady, there is death" Fragonard's drawing replies: "Even in death, there may be Arcady."  

– Erwin Panofsky, from Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition (1936)