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Et in Arcadia ego

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Danielle Gorree
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« on: August 12, 2007, 03:10:40 am »



Et in Arcadia ego
Nicolas Poussin, 1637–1638
oil on canvas
185 × 121 cm, 72.8 × 47.6 in
Musée du Louvre
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Danielle Gorree
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« Reply #1 on: August 12, 2007, 03:14:32 am »

"Et in Arcadia ego" is a Latin phrase that most famously appears as the title of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). They are pastoral paintings depicting idealized shepherds from classical antiquity, clustering around an austere tomb. The more famous second version of the subject, measuring 122 by 85 centimetres (72.8 x 47.6 in), is in the Louvre, Paris, and also goes under the name "Les bergers d'Arcadie" ("The Arcadian Shepherds"). It has been highly influential in the history of art and more recently has been associated with the alternate history of the Priory of Sion popularised in the books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code. This painting will be on temporary display through September 2, 2007 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, as part of the Louvre Atlanta exhibition.
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Danielle Gorree
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« Reply #2 on: August 12, 2007, 03:17:12 am »

Origin

The phrase is a memento mori, usually interpreted as "I am also in Arcadia" or "I am even in Arcadia", as if spoken by personified Death. However, 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. 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.

The first appearance of a tomb with a memorial inscription (to Daphnis) amid the idyllic settings of Arcadia appears in Virgil's Eclogues V 42 ff. Virgil took the idealized Sicilian rustics that had first appeared in the Idylls of Theocritus and set them in the primitive Greek district of Arcadia (see Eclogues VII and X). The idea was taken up anew in the circle of Lorenzo de' Medici in the 1460s and 1470s, during the Florentine Renaissance. In his pastoral work Arcadia (1504), Jacopo Sannazaro fixed the Early Modern perception of Arcadia as a lost world of idyllic bliss, remembered in regretful dirges. In the 1590s, Sir Philip Sidney circulated copies of his romance The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, which soon got into print. The first pictorial representation of the familiar memento mori theme that was popularized in 16th-century Venice, now made more concrete and vivid by the inscription ET IN ARCADIA EGO, is Guercino's 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.

Poussin's own first version of the painting (now in Chatsworth House) 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".



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Danielle Gorree
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« Reply #3 on: August 12, 2007, 03:18:19 am »



Guercino's version of the subject.
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Danielle Gorree
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« Reply #4 on: August 12, 2007, 03:19:29 am »



Poussin's 1627 version of the Arcadian Shepherds, in Chatsworth House, depicting a different tomb with the same inscription.
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Danielle Gorree
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« Reply #5 on: August 12, 2007, 03:20:49 am »

Sculpted versions

The undated mid-eighteenth-century marble bas-relief part of the "Shepherd's Monument, a garden feature at Shugborough House, Staffordshire, England, beneath it is the encoded "Shugborough House inscription", as yet undeciphered. The reversed composition shows that it was copied from an engraving, the compositions of which are commonly reversed because direct copies to the plate produce mirror images on printing.

In 1832 another relief was sculpted as part of the monument marking Poussin's tomb in Rome, on which it appears beneath a bust of the artist. In the words of the art historian Richard Verdi, it appears as if the shepherds are contemplating "their own author's death."

In conjunction with John Andrew, the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay created a marble carving entitled "Et in Arcadia ego" in 1976. Carved below the title are the words "After Nicholas Poussin" The main part of the carving shows a military tank in a pastoral landscape.
« Last Edit: August 12, 2007, 03:28:52 am by Danielle Gorree » Report Spam   Logged
Danielle Gorree
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« Reply #6 on: August 12, 2007, 03:21:46 am »



The Shugborough relief, adapted from an engraving of Poussin's second version.
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Danielle Gorree
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« Reply #7 on: August 12, 2007, 03:28:02 am »

Conspiracy theories

While the phrase "et in Arcadia ego" is a nominal phrase with no finite verb, it is a perfectly acceptable construction in Latin. Alternate historians 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. In The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, under the 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.

Andrews and Schellenberger also claim that the tomb portrayed is one at Les Pontils, near Rennes-le-Château. However, Franck Marie in 1974 and Michel Vallet (aka "Pierre Jarnac") in 1985 had already concluded that this tomb was begun in 1903 by the owner of the land, Jean Galibert, who buried his wife and grandmother there in a simple grave. Their bodies were exhumed and reinterred elsewhere after the land was sold to Louis Lawrence, an American from Connecticut who had emigrated to the area. He buried his mother and grandmother in the grave and built the stone sepulchre. Marie and Vallet had both interviewed Adrien Bourrel, Lawrence's son, who witnessed the construction of the sepulchre in 1933 when a young boy. Pierre Plantard, the creator of the Priory of Sion mythology, tried to argue that the sepulchre at Les Pontils was a "prototype" for Poussin's painting, but it was supposedly situated directly opposite a farmhouse (behind the foliage) and was not in the "middle of nowhere" in the French countryside, as is commonly assumed. The sepulchre has since been demolished.
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Danielle Gorree
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« Reply #8 on: August 12, 2007, 03:33:54 am »




This grave and this landscape look like the picture Nicolas Poussin painted between 1638 and 1639 : Shepherds in Arcadia.

The " Pontils Mill " situated between Campagne Aude and Fa was bought in 1880. In 1903,the owner’s grand mother was buried there. In 1921, her remains were brought to Limoux and the land was sold.
The tomb which can be seen on the photographs was built by the next owner’s son. His mother was buried there.

So this grave didn’t exist when Poussin painted his picture,and the flagstone cannot have been brought by Father Bigou.


http://www.renneslechateau.com/anglais/pontils.htm
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Danielle Gorree
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« Reply #9 on: August 12, 2007, 03:35:15 am »

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Danielle Gorree
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« Reply #10 on: August 12, 2007, 03:36:05 am »

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« Reply #11 on: August 12, 2007, 03:37:14 am »



Recently,the tomb was destroyed by the present owner of the land who was fed up with having curious people on his private land.
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Danielle Gorree
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« Reply #12 on: August 12, 2007, 03:39:02 am »


Inside the tomb of Arques in 1972
I remind you that burial place violation is forbidden by the law. I cannot tell where this photo comes from but I garantee that it was taken at Les Pontils.

http://www.renneslechateau.com/anglais/pontils.htm
« Last Edit: August 12, 2007, 03:39:41 am by Danielle Gorree » Report Spam   Logged
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