Painters across Europe once set skulls among silver cups, lutes and tulips, and that one object turned a display of luxury into a warning about death. Here, one painter hides his own reflection in a glass ball, and in another picture the skull only appears to a viewer standing in exactly the right spot.
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How These Were Chosen
A vanitas is a picture, most often a still life, that sets signs of death among the things people spend their lives acquiring. A skull, an hourglass, a candle just put out or a cut flower answers the books, coins, jewels and instruments around it.
The name comes from the Latin opening of Ecclesiastes, "vanitas vanitatum," vanity of vanities. The genre also gave painters an excuse: the skull turned a table of silver and silk into a sermon, which made the pleasure of painting it respectable.
Each picture here sets a skull or a skeleton against something that belongs to the living. In several of them, the painter also slips into his own picture, so that a work about death keeps a trace of the hand that made it.
12. Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Trompe l'oeil with Studio Wall and Vanitas Still Life (1668)
Behind the stretcher of a small framed canvas, which shows a skull, an hourglass and a candle on a shelf, someone has tucked a note. It is addressed to "Monsuer Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts," painter, in Copenhagen. Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts painted that note himself in 1668, along with everything around it.
Gijsbrechts, a Flemish painter, worked almost only in two kinds of picture, the vanitas and the trompe l'oeil, French for "deceive the eye." Here he folded one into the other. The little vanitas is only a picture within the picture, and everything around it, down to the wall of pale planks it seems to hang on, is there to make the eye believe it is looking at real things.
That illusion is built from the clutter of a working studio. A maulstick, the rod a painter rests his hand on while he works, runs across the frame in red and black. Brushes lie near it, a palette hangs under a shelf, a white rag dangles at the side, and the top right corner of the small canvas has come loose and curls forward to show the back of the cloth.
The note belongs to that game, with one difference: it carries the painter's name and city, as a calling card does. This is probably the picture that won Gijsbrechts the post of court painter to Frederik III of Denmark, and then to Christian V. A painting about how little anything lasts would then have served, first of all, to get its painter hired.
At a Glance
Artist: Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts (born about 1625, last recorded 1675)
Painted: 1668
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 152 × 118 cm (59.8 × 46.5 in)
Where to see it: Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK), Copenhagen
11. Barthel Bruyn the Elder, Vanitas (1524)
A skull sits alone on the upper board of an open wooden cupboard, and below it a white candle in a brass candlestick is still smoldering. Barthel Bruyn the Elder painted this cupboard in 1524, which makes it the oldest picture on this page, and he painted it as the hidden side of something else.