A painting holds one instant, so time is the hardest thing it can show. Painters got around the problem with things that run out in plain sight. On this list, a skeleton snuffs a candle above a pope's crown, and a court painter hides his own address in a picture about the end of all things.
On the table: an hourglass, clock, watch or candle the picture needs.
In the room: Father Time himself appears.
A trick: a fake canvas on a real wall, a hidden face, a skull seen only from the side.
For the powerful: the warning lands on a crown, an emperor, two young diplomats.
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A picture cannot move, so it cannot show time passing the way a film or a song does. Painters answered with objects that measure it, an hourglass, a watch, a sundial, a candle burned low. Some gave time a body instead, a bald old man with wings known as Father Time.
In the 1600s, these objects gathered around skulls in a kind of still life meant to say that every possession is vain. It let painters show off silver, pearls and silk with all their skill, then declare that none of it would last.
Each painting chosen here puts time in plain view, as an instrument, a figure or something visibly running out. Most were costly objects made for wealthy owners, and they spend their whole surface telling those owners that wealth is nothing.
12. Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Trompe l'oeil with Studio Wall and Vanitas Still Life (1668)
The corner of a canvas has come loose and curls forward, showing the bare weave behind it. The canvas is a small still life of an hourglass, a skull and a candle, tacked to a temporary stretcher and propped on a shelf, and the shelf is fixed to a wall of pale wooden boards that fills the entire picture.
Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, a Flemish painter, made it in 1668 at the Danish court in Copenhagen. It belongs to a genre called trompe l'oeil, French for "deceive the eye," and illusions of this kind seem to have won him the post of court painter, first to Frederik III and then to Christian V.
The trick reaches beyond the curling corner. Below the shelf lie the tools that made the little still life, a bundle of brushes, a paint box, a maulstick for steadying the hand and a palette with paint still running down its edge, as if the painter had left the room a moment ago.
None of it is real. The boards are flat paint, and so is the canvas pinned to them, so anyone who admires the curling corner as a clever touch has already been fooled by the wall.
Gijsbrechts even hid his signature inside the illusion. Just below the skull, tucked behind the stretcher at lower left, sits a folded letter addressed to "Monsuer Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts, in Coppenhagen." A picture built to say that nothing lasts still gives the address of the man who painted it.
At a Glance
Artist: Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts (about 1625 to about 1675)
Painted: 1668
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 152 × 118 cm (60 × 46.5 in)
Where to see it: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
11. Juan de Valdés Leal, In Ictu Oculi (1672)
A skeleton carrying a coffin and a scythe reaches out of the dark and pinches out a candle flame. Under its feet lie a crown, a bishop's mitre and the papal tiara. Juan de Valdés Leal painted it in 1672 for a church in Seville whose members spent their days among the dead, and the man who ordered it had an even harsher verdict in store for himself.