Many things in the painting have puzzled commentators since the seventeenth century. The kneeling shepherd points at the word ‘Arcadia’ in the inscription – which is like pointing out the name on a map of the place in which you are looking at the map. Which is to say here, or ‘Here’; or ‘Now’.
So the inscription says: ‘I too have been here’, or ‘I too have been in now’. Death too is here. Death too is now. Death lives concurrent with life; the two streams flow side by side, and sometimes intersect. Or Death is in life, not separate from it, but part of it, the way a capital city is part of a country, but is not the country.
The other puzzling thing is that the shepherd who points forms the shape of a man with a scythe in his shadow. The symbol of death. And so Arcadia and death are inextricably intertwined. Immortality and death are conjoined. Beauty and death are linked, happiness and death are coupled.