Vanitas paintings were common throughout the 16th and 17th century, particularly in the Low Countries (modern day Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg). A reminder of the transience of life, one of their key purposes is to act as a memento mori, but this is far from their only use.
Vanitas paintings were essentially a subgenre of still life paintings and were popularised in the Low Countries. The idea of vanitas is not strictly confined to paintings, or visual depictions more generally. Any piece of work which contrasts the trivial nature of human pleasure with the inevitability of death—such as a piece of music or even a song—could be classified as a vanitas. I wish to focus on paintings simply because they are a key aspect of visual history and vanitas still lifes are an indispensable source of historical knowledge.
Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors might justly be given the label vanitas as it acted as both a double portrait and a still-life. The inclusion of a distorted skull (an obvious memento mori) is the detail for which the painting is best known, although far from the only interesting one. There is another object in the painting which most people would consider ‘distorted’, although technically it is not: a globe.
The globe shows a map of the world, focussing on Europe, which was likely produced some time between 1520 and the early 1530s (necessarily before 1533, obviously). There’s been debate around which map Holbein specifically used as his inspiration but no definite conclusion has been reached, largely because Holbein has almost certainly altered whatever source material he used. In any case, the globe represents an interesting insight into how people at the time viewed the Earth, and what they knew of its geography beyond Europe. Next to it is a book, namely Peter Apian’s Kauffmanns Rechnung (1527), which concerns commercial arithmetic. The inclusion of Apian’s book in this portrait is itself a testament to the work’s success and allows a modern reader to see the text in its intended context, a physical book, instead of an online pdf or ebook. The Lutheran hymn book and variety of mathematical & scientific instruments included, besides their metaphorical use, also provide an insight into the contemporary state of the fields of science and maths. Thus, Holbein’s painting tells us much more about early modern society, science, and knowledge than first meets the eye.
Pieter Claesz was a Dutch painter who was active until over a hundred years after Holbein’s death, which was in 1543. Claesz was a master of still life paintings, who often explicitly alluded to vanitas ideas through the inclusion of a skull. A skull is by no means necessary for memento mori to be implicitly invoked and any still life which includes items of human pleasure could be a vanitas depending on the painting’s other elements. Claesz’s still lifes often included food (sometimes exotic feasts) but no people and included items which had toppled over, often glasses, which necessarily invoke vanitas ideas of the futility of human pleasure.
The work of his which I wish to draw attention to is Vanitas with Violin and Glass Ball (c. 1628). In many ways, this painting is a very typical vanitas of its time, including a musical instrument, a little bit of food, and a human skull. In many other ways, this work is so much more.
Before you can even attempt to analyse the intended meaning of the painting, the sheer skill required to create it is immediately apparent. Most obviously, Claesz has included what amounts technically to a self-portrait in the reflection of the glass ball on the left. The reflection is incredibly accurate to what a real reflection would have looked like and since Claesz was almost certainly painting based off of items he had really placed on a surface in front of him, it’s an example of excellent realism. If there is a mistake in the way the reflection is drawn, it’s certainly too subtle for the average viewer to detect.
The inclusion of himself is certainly a deliberate choice by Claesz. This should be fairly obvious since the inclusion of himself, his easel, and other elements of his workshop would have required significant effort, but a painting of his from 1627 includes a reflective pewter jug which would, in reality, have shown Claesz’s own reflection but notably does not. His inclusion is probably motivated by more than one thing. It may be an attempt at a self-portrait and subsequently a depiction of what the work of a still-life painter was like. Evert Collier who was active in the late 16th century took this idea to the next level in a self-portait in 1683 which shows himself painting a vanitas, including both the work-in-progress and the physical basis of the painting. In a sense, Claesz’s inclusion in the reflection rather than from the viewpoint of a third-party is more personal and intimate, as the audience is forced to recognize that they are viewing the objects through the artist’s eyes.
Just as importantly, Claesz’s inclusion in the painting renders him a part of the vanitas, reminding himself and the audience that the inevitability of death extends to everyone, including the person who is producing the piece of art. Whether intended or not, the reflective self-portait has a strange effect on the degree to which the painting immerses the viewer. Like most other still-lifes, Claesz has taken a conscious choice in putting the items on a raised ledge which extends towards the viewer. This is a type of Trompe-l’œil, an illusion attempting to produce a 3D effect and the motive, unsurprisingly, is to remind the viewer that the memento mori sentiment is directed at them. Of course, the reflection shows the artist rather than the viewer. Usually, as well as an obvious physical constraint of paintings that don’t incorporate real mirrors, the emptiness of the reflection can serve to eerily remove the reassuring reflection of themselves that a viewer would expect to see. In this case, the same effect applies to some degree, as the viewer is met by the Claesz’s gaze, at once giving them the same viewpoint as the artist himself, but also rendering them an object of the painting (in the sense that they are the object of the artist’s attention).
Perhaps what early modern still life and vanitas paintings can show more than anything else is that the early modern world really was early modern. It’s easy to look at a pamphlet from 1632, a portrait from 1621, and an image of a 17th century musical instrument and view them in isolation. But for someone living at the time, every aspect of their life was based on the time period. A painting of men standing next to musical instruments and books, as is the case in The Ambassadors, forces the viewer to appreciate all of these things at once. Similarly, the paintings by Collier and Claesz show that the artist of a still life was both depicting the early modern world but also a part of it themselves.
