Etching - Castella Gandolfo
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1792 (Date manufactured/created)
Shepherds, scatter the ground with leaves, cover
the streams with shade (such Daphnis commands),
and raise a tomb, and on it set this verse:
“I was Daphnis in the woods, known from here to the stars,
lovely the flock I guarded, lovelier was I.”1
Daphnis, the mythical poet-shepherd mourned in Virgil’s fifth Eclogue, is the embodiment of a particular European dream: rustic pleasures divorced from the machinations of power and the pursuit of gain—a world of sheep, panpipes and poetry. But like the visual artists who would later follow him into Arcadia, Daphnis was not without ambition: with his lyrical evocations of the simple life he competed with men and gods. That kernel of conflict—the desire to live in the moment and to be remembered for all time—gives this depicted Arcadia its grit. The perfect Arcadian artist celebrates the mundane through means so perfectly calibrated they almost—but not quite—escape notice. One could argue the entirety of art rests in that “not quite.”
2020.006.006