This paper explores the changing meanings and roles of death in post-Renaissance European culture by focusing on two of Nicolas Poussin"s celebrated paintings known as The Arcadian Shepherds or as “Et in Aracadia ego” and John Milton"s “Lycidas." Death in the Middle Ages, as the cultural historian Michel Foucault has powerfully shown, existed at the heart of people"s life; images of human skulls or skeletons profusely inscribed in the walls of churches or tombs functioned as memento mori, warning people of the mutability and transience of their life. With the advent of the Renaissance, a gradual shift in the cultural meaning of death came about. Death now no longer served to administer Christian moralism but rather occasioned a retrospective contemplation of life or even an affirmation of the continuity between the world of the living and that of the dead. In other words, death became personalized or internalized as part of one"s distinctive life. Poussin"s The Arcadian Shepherds, particularly the later one painted about 1638, which represents four Arcadians in a meditative mood, preeminently shows these shifts in the conception of death. The genre of pastoral elegy popular in the same period also shows a similar attitude toward death. For example, Milton"s "Lycidas," a funeral elegy for his friend Edward King, meditates on death in a mood of self-compassion and envisions his resurrection from the world of the dead. The vision of death demonstrated in Poussin and Milton prefigures the modern idea of authentic death deeply probed by such thinkers as Rainer Maria Rilke and Martin Heidegger.
(0)
(0)