Guercino: Et in Arcadia Ego (1618-22)

The Independent's Great Art series

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About the artist

In praise of the two-part picture - so much better than the three-part picture. A three-parter is stable. The middle picture is always the main event, it sets the agenda, it subordinates the two sides. But a two-parter is dynamic. Its halves are like the ends of a tennis court. They can go on batting away at each other, to and fro, sending and receiving connections, gaining and losing the upper hand, with no resolution.

True, a double-picture can stabilise, too, when there's a clear bond between the images - a before and an after, a man and a wife - and the parts go together like a horse and carriage. A dynamic two-parter is more on the fish-and-bicycle model. There's one thing, and another discontinuous, asymmetrical thing opposing it.

Think of the Wilton Diptych: three distinct human saints on one side, the Virgin and a dense choir of angels on the other. Or think of Andy Warhol's Electric Chairs: a grainy screenprint of an execution chamber, facing a blank field of pure colour. The two halves are in a stand-off, a confrontation. You can make out links between them, but they don't resolve their differences.

A two-parter needn't even consist of two separate panels. It can be a single image with a strong internal division and opposition. A good example is Thomas Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews. On one side, a human couple pose. On the other side, a well-cultivated landscape stretches away. The connection is obvious enough: it's their land - but still the picture seems to insist that it might not be.

Guercino's Et in Arcadia Ego is famous for being the first painting, in fact the first anything, to contain that resonant line of Latin. The words look like they should have a literary source, but if there is one, it hasn't been traced. They mean "Even in Arcadia am I", and the "I" in question is death. Even in that amorous-pastoral dreamland, mortality lurks - by extension, even when our life is easiest, happiest, most free of any thought of disaster, death may strike us. Arcadia is like childhood, a place where they haven't heard of death. Guercino's picture shows the moment of discovery. Two shepherds come across a rotted skull on a tomb. An inscription tells the big bad news.

The picture is a two-parter. Fundamentally, this is because (unlike the later pictures by Poussin that use the same subject) Guercino puts the shepherds and the tomb firmly on opposite sides of the picture, left and right. And the two sides confront each other, in the literal sense that this is a scene of confrontation. The shepherds are confronted by the fact of death - and not just the fact, the face. They meet a dead human head, turned roughly in their direction, which they look at and which looks back at them.

It's important that there's a wide gap separating the shepherds' heads and the death's head. It makes us look back and forward between these two pictorial foci. It carries a feeling of surprise or shock. Our own looking - from skull to shepherds and back to skull - crosses the distance of their looking, as they take in this new thing, very far from their experience and expectations. And the picture does its best to make us share their shock, bringing the skull up big to the very front of the picture, and kitting it out with a settled fly and a nibbling mouse, and turning its empty gaze and grin half-towards us, too. The Latin caption, not in the shepherds' line of sight, seems to be entirely for our benefit.

But none of this would be enough to make the painting into a true two-parter. It is a single frame, after all, and the distances involved aren't that great. To deliver the two -parter's sense of a stand-off, a picture needs some strong division and discontinuity. Et in Arcadia Ego has them. It is divided, roughly in half, into two different kinds of scene. On the left, the view is blocked. The shepherds, as they peep through, are wrapped up in a close ensemble of trees and rocks and leaves, which fills up the front of the picture. They are emerging from protective darkness. On the left, the view is open. We see all the way to the horizon and sky. The skull is exposed, revealed.

And, between the two men and the skull, there's a sharp jump in style. That may seem surprising if you expect style to be a consistent artistic signature. But in the art of this period, style is a performance, and an artist might use different styles as appropriate to different types of picture. Here, two different ones appear in the same picture. The purpose is to dramatise. The shepherds are painted in a smooth, fluid way, with no hard edges, caressed by softly fading shadows. The skull is depicted with brutal naturalism, in bright light and hard shadows and jagged edges. More fractured forms appear in the shattered branches (with screech owl) above it.

The two halves, the two styles, stand for the two kinds of experience that this picture brings together: dreamy innocence and harsh reality, Arcadia and death. Each has its half of the picture. Of course, they 're not just plonked, side by side. There's an explicit link between them, in the picture's story. Dreamy innocence encounters harsh reality. The shepherds see the skull. But the two halves also stand apart - on the one hand, on the other hand. Cover over the shepherds, and the right side of the picture is a convincingly self-contained and well-balanced "landscape with skull" in its own right. Cover over the skull, and the shepherds' eyes might be ogling a nymph.

Death and Arcadia (as we may well believe, when we find ourselves firmly on one side of the fence, or the other) have nothing whatever to do with each other.

  About the artist

Guercino (1591-1666), or rather Il Guercino, "the squint-eyed one", is the nickname of the Northern Italian artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri. He's an effortlessly masterful and versatile baroque painter of religious and legendary scenes, but he's not Caravaggio, and his art mostly lacks the qualities - abruptness, excess, hard realism, pristine clarity, violence - that modern taste looks for in a 17th-century Italian picture. Guercino musters torrents of drapery, gulfs of deep, creeping shadow, pools of glowing flesh, but his painting flows, his transitions are smooth (skills much rated by his contemporaries). His drawn caricatures, on the other hand, are strange and funny.