Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life about 1640
Harmen van Steenwyck (1612–c.1656)
The National Gallery, London
Vanitas is a type of still life painting filled with symbolic objects, such as skulls, wilting flowers or rotten fruit, designed to suggest the fragility and transience of life. It especially flourised in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century. Vanitas are associated with an earlier tradition of momento mori (Latin for 'you must die') which has its roots in classical antiquity and which was a feature of European art from the sixteenth century.
