Vanitas October 2019

Vanitas Symbolism (October 31, 2019)

 

A vanitas still-life painting or photograph represents an old genre that goes back at least to the 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters (with some notable contributions as well from the Spanish). It’s moralistic through and through, its message deriving ultimately from passages in the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments, stressing the fragility and impermanence of life and life’s pleasures both intellectual, cultural, hedonistic, and artistic. From the Hebrew Bible: “Vanity of vanity, saith the preacher; all is vanity” (12: 8). From the Gospel of Matthew: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (6: 19-20). I hasten to add that I am not a religious person—but I find the vanitas genre fascinating and I already have a few vanitas photos in this gallery. Here, I tried to represent as many vanitas symbols as I could. What follows, for those academically inclined, is a brief explanation of the 5 categories covering the typical icons.

 

Category 1: Items representing hedonistic indulgence

- musical instruments: the gold clock behind shows a woman playing a lute. Also representing music, of course, is the sheet music, bottom right (Beethoven’s Für Elise).

- alcohol and wine goblets: I omitted the decanters this time but have a beautiful wine goblet shipped from the UK—it is, in fact, a hand-blown replica of a goblet often seen in the hands of the wicked Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones. (It was hand-made in the Czech Republic for the Merchant Venturers.) It’s about half empty, which symbolizes how quickly life’s pleasures disappear (see also Category 2).

- food: the lemon to the left of the goblet. The lemon is understood to be beautiful to the sight and smell but bitter, just like life can be.

- objects of art: paintings, busts, statues, and the like. Here we have a bust of the Greek poet Homer and behind him a small replica of a statue sculpted by Michelangelo in 1533 for the Tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici. As well, at the left, middle, we have a paint brush leaning against an obvious symbol of art, a paint palette.

- jewelry: we have some gold rings about in the middle of the photo just in front of the long knife. We also have what appears to be a heart-shaped blue diamond and, yes, it’s a replica of the Heart of the Ocean, the famous stone in the movie Titanic and which I purchased for my wife (“she who must be obeyed”) at the Titanic exhibit in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, when we were there a few years ago. It’s hanging just below the blue butterfly in the case.

- perfume: we have two small bottles in front of the sheet music

- items of revelry or sinful living are represented here by the hookah beside the helmet, as well as the dice and playing cards. Four of the five cards have an added, more modern, symbolic significance: two black aces and two black 8s comprise the famous Dead Man’s Hand, allegedly held by American gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok when he was shot down while playing poker. (This idea was suggested by my dA friend David—“Okavanga.”) The red mask with feathers—I can’t pretend to have seen one in a classic vanitas painting—was my idea as another symbol of revelry and reminds me of Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” which is a vanitas painting in prose.

- expensive items (“conspicuous consumption”) are represented here by the exotic red rug. It’s a prized possession of mine all the way from Turkey.

- seashells (two in the picture) are exotic and hard to acquire

- a terrestrial globe, such as we see on the far right, is a meta-symbol of the world’s wealth and vanity (and is made, in this case, of semi-precious stones)

- portraits sometimes appear in vanitas paintings—paintings within a painting! Of course, a portrait is perhaps the most obvious indicator of vanity but if the picture is of a beautiful man or woman, we get the added meaning of beauty as transient. Here I have a photo—yes, a selfie—of my beautiful wife (who’ll kill me when she finds out I included a photo of her in a vanitas picture).

 

Category 2: Items representing life’s transitory nature and the decay of all earthly things

- music and instruments, while Cat. 1, also belong to Cat. 2 because music is transitory

- coins, as represented here by the gold pieces flowing out of the (barely visible) black pouch, are also transitory, never staying with us but moving from hand to hand

- bubbles, smoke, candles, butterflies: flame from candles eventually expires, as do we; its smoke recalls Psalm 102:3: “For my days are consumed like smoke.” Note that one of the two pewter candlesticks is overturned, again suggesting the fragility of life. Bubbles, like life itself, are short-lived, fragile and easily broken; butterflies are beautiful but fragile and easily killed—as dramatized by the case with several colourful butterflies pinned under glass.

- flowers symbolize beauty and so might belong to Cat. 1 but they are short-lived and soon wilt and die. The Book of Job may have provided the inspiration: “Man that is born of a woman is of few days. . . . He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down” (14: 1-2). In fact, I headed to the backyard during a heavy rain storm to bring in a few of these impatiens, almost dead from the cold of a late October.

- clocks, watches, hour-glasses are centrally significant because they measure and record time passing: with every second, we move closer to death. Here we have three kinds of time pieces: an hourglass, a normal clock, and a little pocket watch in front of the books. This photo is a 30-second time-exposure: you can actually see the sliver of sand running from the top to the bottom of the sand-clock.

- the skull is the central symbol in a vanitas illustration, symbolizing our inescapable death and decay. We’s all gonna die!

 

Category 3: Items representing human achievement and culture

- books, for instance, represent the delights of reading. They also contain human knowledge but it’s only of this world, typically, and won’t endure. (Note that one of the books—the one on which sits the skull—is a collection of Poe’s works: he illustrates vanitas themes in “The Masque of the Red Death” and a few other tales.)

- weapons and armor are products of human culture as well (military culture), but even these can’t protect us from death. The knight’s helmet on the far left is here to remind us of that grim truth. Death is a great leveler: even the wealthiest and most powerful among us will come to the same end as the poorest and weakest. The long knife below the helmet, along with its scabbard, serve the same symbolic function. (Thanks to my buddy Bill for lending me these weapons. They go nicely with the helmet!) Note how both knife and scabbard are pointing to the skull on the far right, sitting by itself, biding its time.

Not only do the knife and scabbard work, visually, as leading lines but the entire composition is designed to slant from the top left of the photo to the bottom right. Visually, we’re led inexorably to the skull, to death.

 

Category 4: Items representing the permanent in the Christian context

- religious icons such as crucifixes, rosaries, angels, saints, certain types of flora (carnations, ivy, wheat, laurel): these remind us of or symbolize life after death—in other words, what’s truly important in the Christian context, as illustrated by a line from the Gospel of Matthew: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (6:19-20). Life in Heaven is eternal as opposed to the transient pleasures of Earth, which we should scorn. I have none of these symbols here because I don’t swing that way, baby. Not all vanitas paintings, even the classic ones, contain religious images.

 

Category 5: Written messages to clarify the moralistic meaning of the illustration

- for those viewers who can’t figure it out on their own, some painters provide messages, typically in Latin, explaining it all with well-known epigrams or quotes from the Bible. I have provided perhaps the most famous: Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity.”

 

The dark backdrop, as typically seen in classic vanitas illustrations, reinforces the somber mood and meaning of the scene. Here the left of the backdrop is more brightly lit than the far right side, where the final symbol, the skull, sits in relative darkness.

 

“The room itself is in messy disorder. On the table is a dish of fruit, which is real but appears artificial. Around it are grouped an ominous assortment of decanters, glasses, and heaped ash-trays, the latter still raising wavy smoke-ladders into the stale air—the effect on the whole needing but a skull to resemble that venerable chromo, once a fixture in every ‘den,’ which presents the appendages to the life of pleasure with delightful and awe-inspiring sentiment.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned)

 

Done