A skull grins out of the shadows. A candle sends up its last thread of smoke. A glass lies on its side with the wine long gone. To a prosperous household in seventeenth-century Holland, a picture like this was not morbid decoration. It was a sermon in oil, hung on the wall to be read.
The genre is called vanitas, and it is one of the stranger achievements of the Dutch Golden Age: a form of luxury painting whose whole purpose is to argue that luxury is worthless. Every gleaming goblet and rare shell is rendered with loving precision, then quietly undercut by the reminder that its owner will die and leave the lot behind. The name comes from the opening of the Book of Ecclesiastes, which in St Jerome's Latin Vulgate reads "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas," "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
Vanity means emptiness, not conceit
Read that famous line with a modern ear and it misleads. Vanitas in Latin does not mean self-admiration. It means emptiness, futility, the condition of being void. Behind it sits the Hebrew word hevel, whose most concrete sense is "vapour" or "breath," the puff of air you can see on a cold morning and then cannot. Ecclesiastes is not scolding the reader for pride. It is observing that human effort, wealth and pleasure are as substantial as mist. The painters took that idea at its word and built a visual language on it.
That language belongs to a wider habit of mind in Western art known as memento mori, Latin for "remember that you must die." Memento mori is the broad theme, running from carved tomb effigies to the skull tucked beside a praying saint. Vanitas is the specific Dutch still life that carries it, swapping the graveyard and the hermit for a tabletop of everyday objects, each one chosen to make a point.
Leiden, where the genre began
The vanitas still life has a birthplace and close to a birthdate. A small panel by Jacques de Gheyn the Younger, dated 1603 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is generally regarded as the earliest independent vanitas painted in the Netherlands. It is already a complete essay in the theme. A skull sits in a stone niche between a large soap bubble and a smoking urn, cut flowers wilt to one side, and above the arch the ancient philosophers Democritus and Heraclitus laugh and weep at the folly below. Almost everything the genre would spend the next century elaborating is present at the start.
The form then took root above all in Leiden, the university town where it became a local speciality. Its wittiest exponent was David Bailly, the Leiden painter whose Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols of 1651, in Museum De Lakenhal in the city, plays a clever game with the theme. Bailly made it at sixty-seven yet shows himself as a young man, holding up an oval portrait of his own older face, surrounded by skulls, flowers and a guttering candle. The picture folds youth, age and death into a single frame and leaves the viewer to work out which version of the artist is the real one, and which is only paint.
The skull, the watch and the dying flame
Three objects do the heavy lifting in almost every vanitas, and all three concern time. The skull is the blunt instrument, memento mori reduced to a single prop: this is what you will become. Yet painters rarely let it dominate by size. In Harmen Steenwyck's Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life, painted about 1640 and in London's National Gallery since 1888, a shaft of light falls across a crowded table and picks out the empty sockets of a skull that lolls on the edge, while a lute, a book, a Japanese sword, a shell and a pocket watch lie discarded around it. The vanitas was a speciality of Leiden, and Steenwyck was reckoned its leading exponent.
The pocket watch and the hourglass are time made mechanical, ticking down in plain sight. The candle and the oil lamp work more quietly. A flame just snuffed, with a curl of smoke still rising, is one of the most affecting images the genre produced, because it shows the exact instant of extinction rather than the bare fact of it. Pieter Claesz builds his Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill of 1628, in the Metropolitan Museum, around precisely that. A gap-toothed skull, a toppled glass and the smoking wick of an oil lamp are described in a restricted palette of greys and browns on a pitted stone ledge. The writing quill adds a further turn of the screw, hinting that even the words we leave behind will outlast us by very little.
The bubble and the cut flower
If the skull states the argument, the soap bubble makes it beautiful. The motif carries an ancient tag, homo bulla, "man is a bubble," credited to the Roman writer Varro and later taken up by Erasmus. A bubble is perfect, iridescent and already doomed, holding its shape for a breath before it bursts. De Gheyn's 1603 panel puts one at its centre, and Dutch painters went on to show children and plump putti blowing bubbles as a gentle way of saying that a human life lasts about as long.
Flowers and fruit make the same point through nature rather than physics. A tulip at the height of its bloom is a day from dropping its petals. A peach at perfect ripeness is a day from the bruise. The cut flowers that appear in de Gheyn and throughout the genre are beauty with the clock already running. Painters liked to plant a single wilting bloom, a fallen petal or a leaf turning brown as the tell, the small note of decay that reframes an entire bouquet as a study in loss.
The toppled glass and the interrupted meal
Not every vanitas announces itself with a skull. A quieter branch of the genre, the tonal banquet piece, makes the case through the wreckage of a meal. Willem Claesz Heda perfected it. His Still Life with a Gilt Cup of 1635, in the Rijksmuseum, shows a table abandoned mid-course, with oysters opened, bread broken, a roemer of wine half drunk and a tall glass tipped onto its side. Heda painted pewter, silver, damask and glass in a range of greys so refined that colour almost drains out of the picture, and the effect is of a room someone has just left and will not come back to.
The overturned glass is the key. An empty, fallen vessel reads as a life spent and a pleasure finished, the toast concluded and the company gone. The same logic governs the costlier clutter of the grander vanitas paintings. The lute and the recorder stand for the pleasures of the senses, which fade the moment the note dies. The book and the globe stand for learning and worldly ambition, the sword for power, the shell and the coin for wealth and the vanity of collecting. Every one of them is superbly made, and every one is placed there to be renounced.
Reading the argument today
The trick with a vanitas is to stop looking at it as a handsome arrangement of objects and start reading it as a sentence. The wealth is real, the skill is real, the pleasure the objects promise is real, and then a bubble, a snuffed wick or a fallen glass turns the whole thing into a warning. It is a form built on deliberate contradiction, seducing the eye to correct the soul.
Four centuries on, the theology has loosened but the pictures have kept their edge. The vanitas skull went on to a long afterlife in the wider currents of culture, from the skull Hamlet cradles in the graveyard to the diamond-encrusted human skull Damien Hirst cast in 2007, a memento mori remade as the very vanity it once condemned. A Steenwyck or a Claesz still puts the uncomfortable question that Ecclesiastes asked first, and that no amount of gilding has ever answered: if all of it is vapour, what is worth doing with the little breath you have? The Dutch masters declined to supply the answer. They simply painted the question so well that we are still standing in front of it.
