Et in Arcadia Ego (Guercino)

Two young shepherds halt before a skull set on a crumbling plinth and read the words carved there: ET IN ARCADIA EGO - 'Even in Arcadia, I am' - death speaking from within the pastoral paradise. Guercino, a master of the Italian Baroque, was the first to paint the famous motto, decades before Poussin took it up. A fly and a mouse, small agents of decay, complete the warning. Now in Rome, the picture turns a sunlit idyll into a memento mori: no shepherd's world, however blessed, lies beyond the reach of mortality.