Et in Arcadio Ego

The Savoy No. 8. Et in Arcadio Ego, 1896 by Aubrey Beardsley.

I have been familiar with Beardsley's very distinctive style since my early teens. I am not sure I ever knew that he died of tuberculosis at twenty-five.

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From Wikipedia

Et in Arcadia ego (also known as Les bergers d'Arcadie or The Arcadian Shepherds)[1] is a 1637–38 painting by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), the leading painter of the classical French Baroque style. It depicts a pastoral scene with idealized shepherds from classical antiquity gathered around an austere tomb. It is held in the Louvre.

Poussin painted two versions of the subject under the same title; his earlier version, painted in 1627, is held at Chatsworth House. An earlier treatment of the theme was painted by Guercino circa 1618–22, also titled Et in Arcadia ego.

The translation of the phrase is "Even in Arcadia, there am I". The usual interpretation is that "I" refers to Death, and "Arcadia" means a utopian land. It would thus be a memento mori. During Antiquity, many Greeks lived in cities close to the sea, and led an urban life. Only Arcadians, in the middle of the Peloponnese, lacked cities, were far from the sea, and led a shepherd life. Thus Arcadia symbolized pure, rural, idyllic life, far from the city.

However Poussin's biographer, André Félibien, interpreted the phrase to mean that "the person buried in this tomb 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 centuries. 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 ("ego" referring to Death) is now generally considered more likely; the ambiguity of the phrase is the subject of a famous essay by the art historian Erwin Panofsky (see References). 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.