Arcadia was an area of central Greece. It was held to be a centre of utter savagery ( see the myths of Laocoon and his daughter in Ovids' Metamorphoses) and yet later a paradigm of rural innocence, a place where knowledge of death and fate cast little shadow.

Guercino and then Poussin played with the tension necessary to sustain this belief in their most famous work 'Et in Arcadia Ego', later metamorphosed by Iain Hamilton Finlay in a series of illustrated notes on melancholy distance from the idyll.

| iconologia | divine inspiration |