Vanitas

Vanitas is a variety of still life containing a set of symbolic objects intended to remind the viewer of mortality, the transience of earthly existence and the vanity of worldly pleasures and possessions. The name comes from the Latin phrase in the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes: 'Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas' — 'Vanity of vanities; all is vanity'. In essence the vanitas is an extended painted sermon on the theme that wealth, power, knowledge, beauty and the very pleasures of life are fleeting in the face of inevitable death. The genre flourished above all in Dutch and Flemish art of the seventeenth century, notably in the university town of Leiden. Artists built complex compositions from recognizable symbols: a skull (death), extinguished candles and hourglasses (the passage of time), wilted flowers and rotting fruit (transience), soap bubbles (the fragility of life), books and scientific instruments (the futility of knowledge), coins, jewels and musical instruments (the vanity of wealth and pleasure). The vanitas combined virtuoso illusionistic skill with a profound religious and moral message, reflecting a Protestant worldview and the tension between the material prosperity of the age and spiritual anxiety. The ideas of vanitas are closely related to the broader tradition of memento mori.