Dream of Arcadia, Thomas Cole
Arcadia
The Arcadia of Greek fable was a true heaven on earth, home to many mythical creatures such as nymphs, dryads, centaurs, and several gods and goddesses including Pan and Hermes.
Arcadia was storied to have steep mountains, lush and untouched wilderness forests, mossy rocks, fresh springs and rivers, colorful flowers and abundant vegetation.
However, Arcadia also had traps for mortals who dared to trespass: a vast bubbling swamp, lair of the man-eating Stymphalian vultures with beaks of bronze, razor-sharp metallic feathers, and poisonous droppings.
By the time of the Renaissance, Greek mythology was being reworked and blended into the Christian canon, and Arcadia was reimagined as a pagan Eden, a lost paradise in which the Golden Age lived on and life continued as a pastoral idyll, without contamination by pride or avarice, but physically removed and inaccessible to the rest of humanity. This utopian aspect of Arcadia is the focus of idylic poetry and literature such as Rousseau’s notion of the noble savage.