Find the painter. He’s in this still life somewhere. A table in Haarlem, around 1628: a violin lying across a stack of books, a skull, a wine glass knocked on its side, a pocket watch with its case open, a quill hanging off the edge. At the far left sits a glass ball, and in its curve there’s a window, a room, and a man at an easel.
Pictures like this are called vanitas, and they were made to tell you that everything on the table is going to pass, and so is the hand holding the brush. They are also some of the most beautiful objects anyone has ever painted, and the two facts belong together. Dying things look beautiful because the ending is part of what you are looking at: a flower that is already going asks to be noticed now. The Dutch painted that as a warning. Japan had named it centuries earlier as a feeling, mono no aware, and the two traditions read the same table in opposite directions.
What does vanitas mean?
Vanitas is Latin for vanity, and the word comes from one verse. Ecclesiastes 1:2 in the Latin Bible reads Vanitas vanitatum, dixit Ecclesiastes; vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas. The King James has it as “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” The Hebrew word under all those vanities is hebel, and its first meaning is breath, or vapour, so the verse says all of it is breath.
In painting, a vanitas is a still life built on that verse, setting the transience of worldly life, and the futility of human effort and pleasure, against the everlasting nature of faith. The Dutch of the 1600s, a people getting rich on trade who still took their faith seriously, hung such pictures on their walls as something to reflect on, not to avoid.
The earliest known independent vanitas still life is generally taken to be this panel by Jacques de Gheyn II, dated 1603. The biggest thing in it is a breath: a soap bubble the size of the niche.
The skull, the bubble, the cut flowers and the smoking urn stand for the brevity of life, and the tiny things floating in the bubble, a torture wheel and a leper’s rattle among them, for human folly. On either side of the arch sit Democritus and Heraclitus, the laughing and the weeping philosophers of ancient Greece, and the keystone between them is lettered HVMANA VANA, human vanity.
Vanitas symbols and their meanings, found on one table
Lists of vanitas symbols are columns of icons. The symbols mean more where a painter put them, so take one table: Harmen Steenwyck’s Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life, painted around 1640 and now in the National Gallery in London.
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The table
Every treasure is piled below a diagonal that runs right across the panel, the line the recorder and the sword repeat. Above it there is only wall, and one shaft of light.
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The skull
Lit by the sunlight, lolling to one side at the edge of the table. Death, looked at straight on.
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The lamp
A thin smudge of smoke trails from it. It has just burnt out, or someone put it out.
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The watch
An open pocket watch, ticking. Time running out for whoever stands in front of it.
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The books
Learning, the work of the mind. One looks new and unread, the other well thumbed: ageing, in two volumes.
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The music
An upturned lute and a shawm, a kind of oboe, with a recorder marked with a capital A under the skull. Pleasures that end when the sound does.
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The flask
Earthenware, a frayed rope through its handles. Wine.
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The sword
A Japanese sword in a lacquer sheath, an expensive import. Luxury and power.
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The shell
From a tropical beach few people in Holland would ever see. A collector’s prize, empty, and like the skull, a life that’s gone.
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The light
It runs down the other diagonal, across the empty half, and lands on the skull. Riches on one side of the panel, nothing on the other.
X-rays found one more symbol. Where the flask stands, Steenwyck first painted a bust of a man wearing a wreath, probably a Roman emperor, a symbol of earthly power, and then painted it out.
And the whole thing is gorgeous. Still lifes were prized as a show of skill with materials, the lustre and warped reflections in metal, glass and shell, and Steenwyck seems to have added details to make it harder: a frayed rope, a crumpled page, things jutting out over the table’s edge. So the genre has a knot at its centre: a painting about how empty beautiful things are, made as a beautiful thing to own.
Find the painter: Pieter Claesz in the glass ball
Pieter Claesz worked in Haarlem, and around 1628 he painted the table from the top of this essay. It hangs in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, and the museum’s title gives the secret away: Vanitas Still Life with Self-Portrait.
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The table
A violin on a pile of books, a skull, a glass on its side, a watch, a quill. The museum reads every one as time passing and life running out.
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The glass ball
A mirrored sphere at the far left, and in it the room the picture was painted in, lit by one window.
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The painter
A man in a hat and a white collar, sitting at his easel. Claesz, painting this table.
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The violin, twice
The violin from the table bends around the right side of the glass.
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The skull
Pushed to the far end, under the violin’s scroll. The Met reads the skull, the toppled glass and the oil lamp’s guttering wick in a Claesz of the same year as symbols of life’s brevity.
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The glass
A roemer knocked on its side, its stem studded with drops of glass. Empty.
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The lamp
An oil lamp behind the violin, unlit.
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The walnut
Cracked open, a piece of its shell beside it.
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The watch
A striking watch with its case open and the works showing. Its key hangs over the edge of the table on a blue ribbon.
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The quill
Inkwell, quill and a leather case, pushed out over the edge toward you.
In the museum’s reading the objects stand for time passing and life ending, and the fleeting reflection says the painter’s own life is limited too. Then the message turns over: through his work, the painter overcomes that passing and secures his fame beyond his own death.
He put himself inside the most fragile thing on the table, a reflection that would vanish the moment he stood up, and the panel has held him there for close to four hundred years.
The Ambassadors: the skull you can only see from the side
A century before Claesz, Hans Holbein the Younger put a memento mori, Latin for “remember that you must die”, into a portrait two metres tall. In The Ambassadors, 1533, Jean de Dinteville, the French king’s ambassador on his second mission to England, stands on the left. On the right is his close friend Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur.
Between them, on a two-shelf table, lie instruments for measuring time and the stars, a globe, an arithmetic book open at division, a Lutheran hymn book, a case of flutes with one missing and a lute with a broken string. Together they have been read as an essay on the religious and political turmoil of Europe in 1533, the year Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn.
And across the floor between their feet lies a long pale smear. Seen properly, from close to the right of the painting, it’s a large skull.
A long pale shapeYour eye hereThe crucifix
The trick is called anamorphosis. Holbein stretched the skull along one line, and looking along that line, almost flat to the panel, shortens it back into shape. The painting’s frame, made by the National Gallery in 1996, has a shallow outer moulding so you can still get that side view.
Two young men with every instrument of their world laid out between them, and death in the room in a shape you only see once you step away from where a portrait wants you to stand. One more thing hides at the top left, half behind the green curtain: a crucifix, the hope of salvation through Christ’s sacrifice.
Flowers that never bloomed together
The cut flower is the vanitas symbol that doesn’t look like one. Ambrosius Bosschaert painted this bouquet on copper in 1619, and it’s in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: striped tulips, roses and narcissi, with a carnation and a cyclamen laid on the ledge. Flower pieces like this were assembled. Bosschaert worked from separate studies made through the year, so his bouquets hold flowers that never bloom at the same time, painted for collectors whose rare specimens sometimes cost more than the paintings of them.
Every flower is open and none is past its best. Cut flowers last days, and the painting of them is still in bloom four hundred years later, so the symbol points two ways: toward the brevity of life, and toward a picture that outlives what it shows.
Mono no aware: why dying things look beautiful
Mono no aware is usually translated as the pathos of things, an ache that comes from their passing. It runs through the eighth-century poetry of the Manyōshū and The Tale of Genji in the early eleventh century, and in the eighteenth the scholar Motoori Norinaga showed it to be the central theme of Genji.
Around 1332 a Buddhist priest, Yoshida Kenkō, put the whole argument into two sentences of his Essays in Idleness:
“If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”
He also wrote a line that could hang under any table in this essay: “It is sad to think that a man’s familiar possessions, indifferent to his death, should remain long after he is gone.” It reads like a caption for a vanitas still life, three centuries early.
The cherry blossom is the classic case: no more beautiful in itself than pear or apple blossom, and valued more because it usually starts to fall within a week of opening.
The two traditions part here. The vanitas painters set the flower beside the skull and tell you to look past the world toward what lasts. Kenkō tells you to look harder at the world while it’s here: “How is it possible for men not to rejoice each day over the pleasure of being alive?”
Film found the Japanese version in objects too. The films of Ozu Yasujirō have been called a series of exercises in conveying mono no aware, often through the faces of things rather than of actors. One of the most famous is a vase. In Late Spring, 1949, a daughter lies awake at an inn in Kyoto, on her last trip with her father, who seems to be asleep. Ozu cuts to a vase in the half dark, the shadows of bamboo on the screen behind it, and holds it. Back to her face. Then the vase again, for longer.
Both traditions rest on the same fact. The cut flower is already going, and noticing it means noticing that too. If nothing faded, things would lose their power to move us, and the Dutch warning only works if you can feel the loss. Steenwyck’s surfaces are flawless; the decay lives in what they mean.
The XPRMTS print that belongs beside this essay is For a Moment the Waters Stood Still: two ducks on a garden stream between lily pads, with orange poppies and white tulips on the banks. Like Bosschaert’s bouquet, it holds flowers and still water at the one moment before they change, and leaves the passing for you to supply.
Frequently asked questions
What are the common vanitas symbols and their meanings?
A skull for death. A watch, a burnt-out lamp, a soap bubble, cut flowers and a toppled glass for time running out and how short life is. Books for learning, musical instruments and wine for pleasures that pass, a fine sword for luxury and power, and an empty exotic shell for wealth and for a life that’s gone.
What is the difference between vanitas and memento mori?
Memento mori is Latin for “remember that you must die”, and it covers any reminder of death, like the skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Vanitas is the still-life tradition built on Ecclesiastes, where the reminder comes with a whole table of worldly things that won’t last.
Where is the hidden skull in The Ambassadors?
On the floor between the two men, as a long pale smear that turns into a skull when seen from close to the right of the painting.
Read next
- Why Isle of the Dead feels haunted, Böcklin’s five islands, from Rachmaninoff to Alien.
- Goya’s Black Paintings, art made for no audience on the walls of his own house.
- The Garden of Earthly Delights, explained, Bosch’s three panels, one by one.
- Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, explained, one small figure, an infinite landscape.
References
- The National Gallery, London, Harmen Steenwyck, Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life, NG1256: nationalgallery.org.uk
- The National Gallery, London, Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, NG1314, with the frame note: nationalgallery.org.uk
- Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Pieter Claesz, Vanitas-Stillleben mit Selbstbildnis, Gm1409: objektkatalog.gnm.de
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jacques de Gheyn II, Vanitas Still Life, 1974.1: metmuseum.org
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 49.107: metmuseum.org
- Walter A. Liedtke, “Still-Life Painting in Northern Europe, 1600–1800”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Met, 2003: metmuseum.org
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Ambrosius Bosschaert, Still Life with Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase, SK-A-1522: rijksmuseum.nl
- Mauritshuis, The Hague, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Vase of Flowers in a Window, inv. 679: mauritshuis.nl
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Matsumura Goshun, Cherry Blossoms, 1975.268.77: metmuseum.org
- Graham Parkes and Adam Loughnane, “Japanese Aesthetics”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, with Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness, translated by Donald Keene (Columbia University Press, 1967), section 7: plato.stanford.edu
- Ecclesiastes 1:2, Biblia Sacra Vulgata and the King James Version; Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon, hebel: biblehub.com
- Nadine Zylberberg, “Late Spring”, Reverse Shot, 13 December 2021 (the vase in Late Spring): reverseshot.org
- Images: Steenwyck, Claesz and Holbein via Wikimedia Commons, public domain; de Gheyn and Goshun, The Met, Open Access (CC0); Bosschaert, Rijksmuseum, public domain.