pastoral - Pastoral art

A poem or other work expressing love of and longing for an idealized rural existence. Deriving from Theocritus, whose faithful lovers Daphnis and Chloe have become proverbial, the pastoral mode has been much imitated and adapted. Other forms include the pastoral romance and drama.

Pastoral refers to the lifestyle of shepherds and pastoralists, moving livestock around larger areas of land according to seasons and availability of water and feed.

Pastoral art

In art, whether literature, painting, or another form, it refers to rural subjects such as villages, herdsmen, and milkmaids, that are romanticized and depicted in a highly unrealistic manner.

A work can contain many pastoral elements mixed with other genres. The fourth act of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale features a pastoral setting, but the focus is on the apparent shepherdess, Perdita, who is actually a foundling and a princess, and the setting is intruded on by her princely lover Florizel, and by his disapproving father the king.

Classical origins

The pastoral genre was invented in the Hellenistic era by the Sicilian poet Theocritus, who may have drawn on authentic folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds. The Roman poet Virgil adopted the invention and wrote eclogues, which are poems on rustic and bucolic subjects, that set an example for the pastoral mood in literature. Later pastoral poets, such as Edmund Spenser and Alexander Pope, typically looked to the classical pastoral poets for inspiration. A typical mood is set by Christopher Marlowe's well known lines from "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love":

Pastoral shepherds and maidens usually had Greek names like Poliphilus or Philomela. Pastoral poems were set in beautiful rural landscapes, the literary term for which is "locus amoenus" (Latin for "beautiful place"), such as Arcadia, a rural region of Greece, mythological home of the god Pan, which was portrayed as a sort of Eden by the poets.

Other uses of the pastoral setting

A harsher note was struck in Girolamo Fracastoro's 1530 poem Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus ("Syphilis, or the French Disease"), in which Syphilus ("pig-lover"), a typical pastoral name for a shepherd, is stricken by the disease syphilis that takes its name from Fracastoro's poem. Fracastoro's poem contains the first recognisable description of the symptoms of syphilis (today, few contemporary physicians announce their discoveries in verse, pastoral or otherwise). it was translated into English heroic couplets by Nahum Tate:

Pastoral paintings, likewise, were typically used to give the respectability of the classics to paintings of nymphs, swains, satyrs, and other mostly human legendary creatures frolicking in neatly tended hills and woods in a state of perpetual déshabillé.