Et in Arcadia Ego Quotes

“[T]he two fundamental tragedies of human existence, frustrated love and death”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego

“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 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 Latin grammar but justice to the new meaning of Poussin's composition.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego

“The correct translation of the phrase ("Et in Arcadia ego") 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.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego

“The famous "O bell'età de l'oro" in Torquato Tasso's Aminta (1573) is not so much a eulogy of Arcady as an invective against the constrained and conscience-ridden spirit of Tasso's own period, the age of the Counter-Reformation. Flowing hair and nude bodies are bound and concealed, deportment and carriage have lost touch with nature; the very spring of pleasure is polluted, the very gift of Love perverted into theft.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego

“It was, then, in the imagination of Virgil, and of Virgil alone, that the concept of Arcady, as we know it, was born — that a bleak and chilly district of Greece came to be transfigured into an imaginary realm of perfect bliss. But no sooner had this new, Utopian Arcady come into being than a discrepancy was felt between the supernatural perfection of an imaginary environment and the natural limitations of human life as it is.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego

“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, Et in Arcadia Ego

“We can easily see that the new conception of the Tomb in Arcady initiated by Poussin's Louvre picture, and sanctioned by the mistranslation of its inscription, could lead to reflections of almost opposite nature, depressing and melancholy on the one hand, comforting and assuaging on the other; and more often than not, to a truly "Romantic" fusion of both.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego

“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.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego

“Like the whole classical sphere, of which it had become an integral part, Arcady became an object of that nostalgia which distinguishes the real Renaissance from all those pseudo- or proto-Renaissances that had taken place during the Middle Ages: it developed into a haven, not only from a faulty reality but also, and even more so, from a questionable present. At the height of the Quattrocento an attempt was made to bridge the gap between the present and the past by means of an allegorical fiction.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego

“During the Middle Ages, when bliss was sought in the beyond and not in any region of the earth, however perfect, pastoral poetry assumed a realistic, moralizing and distinctly non-Utopian character.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego

“Virgil does not exclude frustrated love and death; but he deprives them, as it were, of their factuality. He projects tragedy either into the future or, preferably, into the past, and he thereby transforms mythical truth into elegiac sentiment. It is this discovery of the elegiac, opening up the dimension of the past and thus inaugurating that long line of poetry that was to culminate in Thomas Gray, which makes Virgil's bucolics, in spite of their close dependence on Greek models, a work of original and immortal genius.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego

“With only slight exaggeration one might say that he (Virgil) "discovered" the evening.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego

“In Theocritus' real Sicily, the joys and sorrows of the human heart complement each other as naturally and inevitably as do rain and shine, day and night, in the life of nature.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego

“They conjure up the retrospective vision of an unsurpassable happiness, enjoyed in the past, unattainable every 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.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego