What Is a Vanitas? Still Life Arranged as a Reminder of Death

A vanitas is a still life whose objects are chosen to make a point about mortality and the futility of earthly achievement, and the name comes from the opening of Ecclesiastes in the Latin translation, a phrase usually rendered as vanity of vanities and better understood as breath or vapour, meaning something insubstantial rather than something conceited. The paintings flourished in the Dutch Republic and in Flanders through the seventeenth century, with Leiden a particular centre, and they sat within a wider culture of still life painting that was itself unusually developed in that place and period. They are simultaneously moralising and lavish, depicting the objects they warn against with enormous technical skill and evident pleasure, and that tension is the most interesting thing about them.

The vocabulary is consistent enough that the paintings can be read almost item by item:

• •A skull, the plainest statement possible and the defining element of the genre
• •An extinguished or guttering candle, and smoke, for a life ending and for insubstantiality
• •Cut flowers and overripe or decaying fruit, beautiful and already dying
• •Bubbles, mirrors and glass, fragile and reflecting only appearance
• •Books, instruments, maps and globes, for learning and worldly ambition that death makes pointless
• •Coins, jewels and fine vessels, for wealth that cannot be kept
• •Watches, hourglasses and overturned goblets, for time running out
• •Butterflies, ears of wheat and laurel, occasionally admitting a hope of something beyond

The conditions that produced the genre are specific and worth setting out. The Dutch Republic in this period was extraordinarily wealthy from trade and had a broad prosperous middle class buying paintings in numbers unmatched anywhere, with estimates of millions of pictures produced over the century for domestic interiors rather than for churches or courts. The dominant religious culture was Calvinist, discouraging religious imagery in churches while remaining intensely concerned with worldly attachment and the state of the soul, which left moral instruction to be carried by domestic pictures. Plague, war and the ordinary mortality of the time kept death immediate. And a painting that warns against luxury while being itself a luxury purchase resolves an awkwardness for a buyer who is rich and pious at once, which is very likely part of why the format sold.

Particular artists specialised in the form and their careers indicate how the trade worked. Leiden produced a group of painters working in the genre over several decades, with several families passing the speciality between generations, and the works were sold through dealers and at markets rather than commissioned individually, which is unusual for the period and reflects the size of the buying public. Prices varied enormously with the fineness of the finish, since a painting worked up to an almost invisible brushstroke took months and commanded a great deal, while a rapidly painted example was affordable to a modest household. Some painters produced near-identical compositions repeatedly, which indicates demand for a recognised product. Women painters worked in still life more than in other genres, since it required no access to life models or to academies, and several built substantial reputations in it.

The genre sits within a longer history of reminders of death in European art. Medieval tomb sculpture sometimes depicted the decaying body beneath the idealised effigy. The dance of death, showing a skeleton leading away people of every rank, was a widespread image from the late medieval period and carried an explicitly levelling message. Hermit saints were painted contemplating a skull, which is the same iconography in a religious portrait. The phrase reminding the viewer that they too will die appears in paintings of shepherds finding a tomb in an idealised landscape. Outside Europe, comparable traditions exist in Buddhist contemplation of corpses and in the imagery of certain Tibetan practices. The Dutch still life is distinctive for putting the message into an arrangement of ordinary beautiful objects rather than into a figure or a scene.

Objects in these still lifes are chosen to make a point about mortality, with the name taken from Ecclesiastes and meaning insubstantial rather than conceited. Skulls, guttering candles, cut flowers, bubbles, books and coins each carry a settled meaning. The genre flourished in a wealthy Calvinist republic where domestic paintings carried the moral instruction that churches did not.