In this post we will talk about such a still life genre as “Vanitas”, the word comes from the Latin “vanity, vanity”. To understand the meaning of this type of still life, you should turn to the book of the Bible - Ecclesiastes: “Vanity is vanity, said Ecclesiastes, vanity is vanity - everything is vanity!”. This phrase demonstrates the idea that human life is just a pursuit of pleasures that leads to death of any person.

In a previous post, it was already said that all the objects depicted in a still life are not random and play their part. In Vanitas still life, the compositional center is traditionally the human skull, which symbolizes the inevitability of death.

In the painting “Still Life with a Skull” (1671) by Philippe de Champagne, a French Baroque artist, we see only three objects on a white plate: skull, tulip, hourglass. This still life is the pinnacle of brevity, but equal in strength to still lifes with an abundance of details. All objects carry the meaning of the frailty of being, the fleetingness of life, but the skull is a litmus test for determining the genre, if there is a skull in a still life, then this is necessarily Vanitas. There are exceptions when there is no image of a skull in a still life, but the picture according to other indicators refers to this genre.
A tulip is a symbol of the Netherlands, a collectible in the 17th century Netherlands, many Dutch people fanatically and rashly bought tulip bulbs, planted them - this is not an expensive pleasure, so a tulip in a still life symbolizes irresponsibility and unreasonableness.
Hourglass is the inevitability of death, because if you turn the hourglass, then the sand run, like the run of time, cannot be stopped.

The meaning of the Vanitas still lifes may seem heavy and oppressive, you can ask the question: “why remind people of death?”, But in the 16-17 centuries there were many diseases, epidemics, wars - people's lives were extremely short, so the still life was a reminder to them that you need to appreciate and enjoy every moment of your life, not forgetting the moment of happiness.