A Neglected Shadow in Poussin'sEt in Arcadia Ego

Abstract

Few works of art have been so assiduously debated and analyzed as Poussin's Louvre version of Et in Arcadia Ego (Fig. 1).1 Its differences in composition, idea, and mood from the Chatsworth version of 1629 are well established; its new classicism in composition, its new Stoic component of elegiac meditation as opposed to shocked encounter with mortality have been exhaustively studied and refined by Panofsky, Blunt, and Friedländer.2 The sophistication of the artist in the later version, his poetic power of reflecting philosophical ideas in pictorial form, the picture's color, the landscape, all these and more have been justly celebrated and reviewed. In short, the painting is a paradigmatic work not only in the tradition of pastoral elegy, Baroque classicism, and the history of ideas, but also for our estimate of Poussin's own stature as an artist of unsurpassed powers in the history of French painting in particular, and of European painting as a whole.3 Oddly, however, one detail of the work has received little or no comment, despite its central position. This detail is the shadow cast upon the tomb by the kneeling shepherd who traces the inscription “Et in Arcadia Ego” engraved on the side of the monument.

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