Et in Arcadia ego (Guercino)
Overview
 
Et in Arcadia ego is a painting by the Italian Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...

 artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri , best known as Guercino or Il Guercino, was an Italian Baroque painter from the region of Emilia, and active in Rome and Bologna. Guercino is Italian for 'squinter', a nickname that was given to him because he was cross-eyed...

 (Guercino), from c. 1618-1622. It is now on display in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica
The Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, or National Gallery of Ancient Art, is an art gallery in Rome, Italy, located on two sites: the Palazzo Barberini and the Palazzo Corsini....

 of Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

.

The painting shows two young shepherds staring at a skull, with a mouse and a blowfly, placed onto a cippus with the words Et in Arcadia ego
Et in Arcadia ego
"Et in Arcadia ego" is a Latin phrase that most famously appears as the title of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin . They are pastoral paintings depicting idealized shepherds from classical antiquity, clustering around an austere tomb...

 ("I too [was] in Arcadia"). The latter is a moral reference to Death
Death
Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include old age, predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury....

. The phrase appears for the first time in art and architecture in this work.
Quotations

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims, aphorism 370, “The Danger in Admiration,” (1879).

It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Speech, January 1842, at the Masonic Temple in Boston, repr. in The Dial (1843) and Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849).

It’s the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It’s a quality to be proud of. But it’s a quality that many people seem to have neglected.

Gerald Ford, Time Magazine|Time (January 28, 1974)

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.

Rupert Murdoch, Address, 1989, to the Edinburgh Television Festival. quoted in Guardian (London, Jan. 1, 1990).

One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann (February 26, 1824).

One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.

William Hazlitt, Complete Works, vol. 9, ed. P.P. Howe (1932). Characteristics, no. 162 (first published anonymously in 1823).

People of quality know everything without ever having learned anything.

Molière, Les Précieuses Ridicules, sc. 9 (1659).

So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands, ch. 2 (1987).

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.

Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition, aph. 25 (1973).

The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say.

Ramsey Clark, International Herald Tribune (Paris, June 18, 1991).

 
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