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 its center, surrounded by things that wear out or run out: a watch, a candle that has just been snuffed, an empty glass, books, coins, musical instruments. The genre flourished in the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century.
The name comes from the Bible. The book of Ecclesiastes opens with a cry that the Latin Bible gives as "Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas," which the King James Bible renders as "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
Harmen Steenwyck's still life of about 1640, now in the National Gallery in London, shows the idea at work. A beam of light falls on a skull, which sits next to a pocket watch, a lamp that has just gone out, a Japanese sword and a seashell.
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The English word vanity, however, sends most people in the wrong direction. Today it suggests pride, someone admiring their own face in a mirror. That is not what Ecclesiastes meant, and it is not what these paintings are about.
The Hebrew word behind the Latin is hevel, and its literal meaning is breath, or vapor. The Bible uses it in Job, in the Psalms and in Isaiah for things that vanish as fast as a breath. When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, he chose vanitas, a word built on the Latin for empty. The King James Bible turned it into vanity, which in the seventeenth century meant something hollow or worthless more than conceit.
So "all is vanity" first meant "all is breath," or everything passes. That older sense explains the soap bubbles that float above so many of these tables. It does not explain everything else on them. A skull alone would have been enough to say that people die, and yet the painters crowded their tables with swords, lutes, books and coins.
What You'll Discover
Why a soap bubble fits the original word.
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.