A vanitas is a still life painted to remind the viewer that life is short, and that everything a person owns, learns or enjoys will be left behind.
A skull usually sits at the center, surrounded by objects that wear out or run out: a watch, a snuffed candle, an empty glass, books, coins.
Pictures of this kind were a specialty of the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century. The young Protestant country, which became the Netherlands, had grown rich on trade, and its merchants bought paintings to hang in their own homes.
Harmen Steenwyck, a painter who worked in the university town of Leiden, made a textbook example around 1640. On a small wooden panel now in the National Gallery in London, a beam of light falls across a skull. Around it lie a pocket watch, an oil lamp whose flame has just gone out, a Japanese sword and a seashell.
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The name of these pictures, vanitas, is a Latin word taken from the opening of Ecclesiastes, a book of the Hebrew Bible traditionally attributed to King Solomon. Its narrator has tried wealth, pleasure and wisdom, and found that none of them lasts.
The Latin Bible gives his opening cry as "Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas," which the King James Bible renders "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." To a modern ear the English word suggests pride, someone admiring their own face in a mirror, but the book meant something else.
The Hebrew original is hevel, which means breath or vapor. The book of Job, the Psalms and the prophecies of Isaiah use the same word for whatever vanishes as quickly as a breath in the air.
At the end of the Roman Empire, the Christian scholar Jerome translated the Bible from Hebrew into Latin, and his version remained the Bible of the Western Church for centuries. For hevel he chose vanitas, built on the Latin for empty.
In the seventeenth century the English vanity still kept that sense of something hollow or worthless. "All is vanity" meant that everything passes, and that was the message the Dutch painters set out on their tables.
A bubble for a breath
Of all the objects on those tables, one comes closest to the Hebrew word. Again and again, Dutch painters showed soap bubbles floating in the air above the skull…
What You'll Discover
Where the skull hid before the still life.
How a vanitas differs from a memento mori.
What a Japanese sword says about money.
Why buyers paid for paintings against wealth.
The painter who showed his own old age.
Whether a diamond skull ever really sold.