This small painting depicts a pastoral scene set in the ancient world at an unspecified moment. A female figure is seated with a thoughtful air, while a shepherd, with an eloquent gesture, points out to her an inscription on what is probably a tomb: Ancor io fui in Arcadia (I, too, was in Arcadia), an Italianisation of the Latin motto “Et in Arcadia Ego” which has been interpreted in several different ways, all of them focusing on life’s fleeting nature. We sense that the author of the inscription must have been a person who lived in that idyllic far-off age and who wished to leave a trace of his earthly existence. The inscription, however, rediscovered in a later era, has the ring of a warning to mortal man even in times of greater happiness, prompting nostalgic thoughts about the inexorable passage of time.
This poetic and iconographical artifice, resting on the distance separating real time from an idyllic past, makes use of mythology, yet it was a modern invention devised in intellectual circles in Rome in the early decades of the 17th century. We first encounter it in celebrated paintings by Guercino (1618) and Poussin (c.1630 for his first version and c.1639 for his second). Thus the scene is part of an old, typically Roman cultural tradition that looks back with nostalgia to a legendary past, identified in time and space with Arcadia, which continued to provide artists and men of letters with food for thought and inspiration even in Giani’s day. Thus it was probably a topic for debate in the sessions of such private academies as the Accademia dei Pensieri in Rome or the Accademia della Pace in Bologna, in which Giani was the driving force. The decision to translate the famous Latin motto into Italian is also typical of Giani, in view of his inclination to popularise even mythology and the more abstruse, academic episodes in ancient history in an effort to place them in more of an everyday setting.
Despite the painting’s small size, the artist imbues the scene with a surprising breadth by carefully sizing his figures in proportion to the space in which they are contained.
Giani builds his image like the stage of a theatre, with the tomb on the left closing off the landscape in depth, a screen of bushes filtering the transition from the foreground to the background, and just enough “stage prop” items to suggest a bucolic setting.
The picture exemplifies the “sketchy” style and technique that Giani favoured in his smaller pictures, his brushwork appearing extremely rapid yet capable of skilfully modulating the transparency and textural thickness of the paint to create atmospheric effects.
We may subscribe to Ottani Cavini’s suggestion that the picture was painted some time between the end of the 18th century and the first decade of the 19th, on the strength of stylistic and compositional similarities with other works from Giani’s graphic output.
A drawing in a private collection can be associated with the Faenza picture, but in some ways the drawing is more polished; and while the composition is broadly identical, it differs in certain specific details such as the female figure, who holds a lyre in her hand, and in the figures’ overall relationship with the landscape.
