Vanitas — On Mortality

Vanitas is the branch of still-life painting that exists to remind you that you will die. The name comes from Ecclesiastes — vanitas vanitatum, all is vanity — and the genre flourished in seventeenth-century Holland and Flanders, where Protestant moral seriousness met an unprecedented appetite for objects. The pictures assemble a vocabulary of decay: a skull, a guttered candle, a watch, soap bubbles, cut flowers already wilting, a book left open and unfinished. Each is a symbol of time running out, and the painter's virtuosity in rendering them — the gleam on a glass, the bloom on a grape — is itself part of the lesson, since that beauty too will pass. The mood is contemplative and melancholic by design. Look for the small interruptions of the perfect arrangement: the fly on the fruit, the petal fallen to the table. Those are the painter speaking directly to you, in the only language a still life has, about the one thing it is really about.

Curatorial note by Alexander Knigge, Editor, Artifact World Gallery