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"Et in Arcadia ego" is a Latin phrase that most famously appears as the title of a painting by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). This is a pastoral painting depicting idealized shepherds from classical antiquity, clustering around an austere tomb.
The phrase is a memento mori, meaning "I am also in Arcadia" or "I am even in Arcadia", as if spoken by personified Death. The sentiment was meant to set up an ironic contrast by casting the shadow of death over the usual idle merriment that the nymphs and swains of ancient Arcadia were thought to embody.
The painting, measuring 122 by 85 cm, is in the Musée du Louvre in Paris and also goes under the name "Les bergers d'Arcadie" ("The Arcadian Shepherds"). Poussin made several monochrome and at least one polychrome draft version on this theme before giving us this famous rendition. The other full-dress version of the subject by Poussin is at Chatsworth. The shepherds were less serene in some of the other versions.
The first appearance of a tomb with a memorial inscription (to Daphnis), amid the idyllic settings of Arcadia, appears in Vergil, Eclogues V, 42ff. Vergil took the idealized Sicilian rustics that had first appeared in the Idylls of Theocritus and set them in the primitive Greek district of Arcadia. The idea was taken up anew in the circle of Lorenzo de' Medici in the 1460s and 70s, during the Florentine Renaissance. In 1502 Jacopo Sannazaro published his long poem Arcadia that 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 poem 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 in stages during 1618–22 (in the Galleria Barberini, Rome), in which the inscription gains force from the prominent presence of a skull in the foreground.
To those not familiar with Latin, the phrase "et in Arcadia ego" appears to be an incomplete sentence, since it contains no overt verb. (In reality Latin, like many other languages, allows dropping forms of the word 'be'.) This presumed defect has led some pseudohistorians to believe that it represents some esoteric message concealed in a (possibly anagrammatic) code. In The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Baigent, Lee and Lincoln proposed that the phrase 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 of another important Biblical figure.
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