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| Guercino Et in Arcadia Ego oil on canvas Palazzo Barberini, Rome |
"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 intellectual 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 His Face in the River Pactolus (now in the Metropolitan Museum at New York), the iconographically essential figure of the river god Pactolus accounting for the inclusion of its counterpart, the less necessary river god Alpheus, in the Arcadian picture."
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| Nicolas Poussin Et in Arcadia ego oil on canvas Chatsworth House, Derbyshire |
"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 pleasure soon to be ended. The phrase Et in 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."
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| Nicolas Poussin Midas washing his face in the River Pactolus oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"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 memento mori in classical garb paired with a cave avaritiam in classical garb, but standing by itself – we can observe a radical break with the medieval, 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 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."
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| Nicolas Poussin Et in Arcadia ego oil on canvas Louvre |
"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 a thinly veiled moralism to undisguised elegiac sentiment."
– Erwin Panofsky, from Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936)