Аркадские пастухи

Poussin had been in Rome about three years when he painted this, and the city around him was full of men digging up and cataloguing antiquity. Cassiano dal Pozzo, the patron who mattered most to him, was assembling thousands of drawings of Roman remains, coins and inscriptions in what he called his paper museum. A stone tomb with a Latin inscription, puzzled over by shepherds who have stumbled on it, is exactly the sort of thing that circle enjoyed. The Latin stays deliberately open. It can be read as death speaking, present even in Arcadia. Poussin came back to the subject about ten years later in the version now in the Louvre, calmer and more upright, and left out the skull that sits on top of the tomb here. This first one has been in the Devonshire collection at Chatsworth in Derbyshire since the 18th century, recorded with the duke there by 1761.