The third painter, representing the third male shepherd featured in the Shugborough relief sculpture, was Guercino.
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591 – 1666), best known as Guercino or Il Guercino, was an Italian Baroque painter active in Rome and Bologna. Guercino is Italian for squinter, a nickname that was given to him because he was cross-eyed.
He painted two large canvases, "Elijah Fed by Ravens" and "Samson Seized by Philistines", in what appears to be a stark naturalist Caravaggesque style (a style popularized by the Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio).
The first pictorial representation of the familiar memorial inscription “ET IN ARCADIA EGO” is Guercino's version of "The Shepherds of Arcadia", painted between 1618 and 1622. The inscription gains force from the prominent presence of a skull in the foreground, beneath which the words are carved.
Poussin's own first version of the painting in 1627 was probably commissioned as a reworking of Guercino's version.
Contemprorary with Guercino’s version of “The Shepherds of Arcadia” was his painting “The Flaying of Marsyas by Apollo” (1618-1622), in which the same group of shepherds is present.
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