A vanity is a particular category of Still life, with high value symbolic system, a kind very practiced at the time Baroque, particularly in Holland.

Their title and their design are to be put in connection with this quotation of the Ecclésiaste: vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas (vanity of vanities, all is vanity). The message is to meditate on the uselessness of the worldly pleasures vis-a-vis dead which watch for. It is at the same time an essential component with the emergence of the Still life as a kind.

If the objects with the Moyen-âge can appear in painting, it is because they have a direction. In the vanities , the objects all represented are symbolic systems of the brittleness and the brevity of the life, of the time which passes, of death. Among all these symbolic systems objects, the human cranium, symbol of death, are one of most current. One finds this memorandum mori (remember that you will die) in the symbols of the human activities: to know, science, richness, pleasures, beauty… Vanities denounce the relativity of knowledge and the vanity of the mankind subjected to the escape of time, with death.

At the 17th century, these moralized dead natures became necessary to the devotion of the Europe in forms and with different intentions in North and the South, for the Catholique S and the Protesting S.

See too

Internal bonds

• the Ambassadors of Hans Holbein the Young person
• Anamorphosis
• the Known as of three dead and the three sharp ones
• Memorandum mori
• Triumph of Dead the
• Art to die well

External bonds

• Site devoted to vanities and their genesis