A skull on a table is difficult to ignore. In a seventeenth-century painting, however, it may be the flower beside it that deserves a second look. Cut from its roots and displayed at its finest, the flower is already dying. The skull makes the warning plain; the flower makes it personal.
This is the uncomfortable attraction of vanitas painting. Artists lavished care on things that their pictures asked viewers to regard as temporary: polished armour, expensive instruments, beautiful books. The pleasure of looking is part of the warning: the viewer can see exactly why these possessions would be difficult to relinquish.
The works gathered here show how varied that warning could be. Some were made for close, private contemplation; others turn mortality into an elaborate spectacle. One contains no skull at all. Together, they offer a way into still life and memento mori that begins with the paintings themselves: what is on the table, how it has been arranged, and what a viewer might have recognised in it.
Still Life, Vanitas And Memento Mori: What Is The Difference?
The three terms are related, but describe different things. Still life is a genre: a picture whose principal subject is an arrangement of objects. Flowers, fruit, vessels, books and instruments are familiar examples. Such paintings can celebrate abundance or the pleasure of looking. They need not carry a warning about death.
Memento mori means “remember that you must die”. It names a reminder, rather than a particular kind of picture. A skull held by a young man, an image used in prayer or a funerary monument may all serve this purpose. The reminder could encourage a Christian viewer to prepare for death, but its appeal also rests on an experience shared far beyond that setting: knowing that life has a limit.
Vanitas applies this reflection to the things people value during their lives. The term comes from the language of Ecclesiastes, where human endeavour is considered against the passing of time. “Vanity” here means more than excessive pride in appearance. It includes the fleeting nature of wealth, beauty, power and learning. The National Gallery’s glossary explains the connection between these accomplishments and reminders of mortality.
Why did this subject flourish in seventeenth-century northern Europe? One part of the answer lies in the objects themselves. As Walter Liedtke’s essay for the Metropolitan Museum describes, still life developed alongside prosperity, trade and collecting. Pictures of possessions belonged to a society taking an increasing interest in possessing things. A vanitas could therefore be both a desirable object for a home and a warning about the value placed on desirable objects. That tension is central to its appeal.
A Flower, A Skull And An Hourglass
Three objects, a stone ledge and a dark background: the painting associated with Philippe de Champaigne has almost nothing to spare. The flower, skull and hourglass stand separately, each given enough room to be considered. Their arrangement is so clear that the picture can seem immediately understood. Spending longer with it reveals how carefully that clarity has been made.
The tulip is the only living thing, although its life has already been shortened by cutting. Its red and yellow petals catch the eye before the skull does. At the other end of the ledge, sand measures out a period of time. Between them, the skull shows what the flower and the hourglass can only suggest. The composition brings a brief life, passing time and death into a single view.
Notice how little drama the painter supplies. The skull does not grin from a crowded heap; there is no gesture, no written command. The glass vase receives the same steady attention as the bone. This restraint leaves the viewer to make the connection. It also allows the tulip to remain beautiful, even after its meaning has become troubling.
The attribution and date deserve care. The French national collections record attributes the painting to Champaigne, while Musée de Tessé exhibition documentation places it around 1640–1650. Those are the terms used here.
An Early Memento Mori, Around 1530
The little piece of paper beneath this skull supplies the words: MEMENTO MORI. Painted around 1530 by an unidentified artist in the Southern Netherlands, the panel predates the great seventeenth-century enthusiasm for vanitas still lifes. The Mauritshuis records its height as just 34.2 centimetres. It is a small picture with a remarkably direct address.
There is no surrounding inventory of accomplishments. A column and an opening towards a distant landscape give the skull its setting, but the pale paper brings the eye back to the foreground. The viewer moves between an object and an instruction: first recognising what is shown, then reading what is asked.
Its small size matters to the encounter. This is an image to approach, rather than a spectacle to take in from across a large room. We do not know whose skull it represents, and no portrait provides a particular person to mourn. The words are addressed to whoever happens to be looking.
N. L. Peschier: The Music Has Stopped
Peschier’s table suggests that somebody has only just left it. Music lies open, a quill is ready for use, and a violin rests diagonally across the arrangement. Among the papers is a crumpled letter. The skull appears in a setting of ordinary occupations, making their interruption feel more immediate.
The painting is signed and dated 1660. The Rijksmuseum’s record draws attention to a detail easy to miss: the smouldering oil lamp on the wall. A flame has gone out, but its trace remains. The hourglass adds another kind of time, measured rather than abruptly interrupted.
Musical instruments were particularly useful in vanitas painting because their pleasure depends on passing time. A violin can last for centuries; a note cannot be held once it has sounded. Here the score and instrument survive, but the player is absent. The painting leaves us with the means of making music and none of its sound.
The discarded letter gives that larger idea a domestic scale. Its contents are less important to our reading than its crumpled condition. Something once worth writing and sealing has become an object on a table. Peschier makes the passage from urgent concern to neglected paper visible in its folds.
Sébastien Bonnecroy: The Painter Enters His Own Vanitas
Bonnecroy brings the warning into his own profession. Below the skull lie a palette, a long painter’s support stick and a folded letter held by a knife. These are working objects, the equipment through which an artist might earn a living and establish a reputation.
The French collections catalogue identifies the letter as addressed to Bonnecroy himself and records the signature and date, 1641, on the ledge. This small piece of evidence changes the picture. The tools are not simply a general emblem of painting: the artist has introduced his own name and daily work into the argument.
Above them, the skull wears a fragile crown of straw. Tobacco, a pipe and a few coins extend the arrangement from labour to pleasure and money. The thin trace of smoke and the dry strands around the bone look particularly insubstantial beside the solid objects below.
There is a revealing difficulty in painting a warning about the fragility of artistic achievement. Bonnecroy’s skill is precisely what keeps us looking. His name and tools have survived in the picture long after his working day ended. The vanitas includes painting among life’s temporary pursuits while demonstrating how much a painting can preserve.
Jan Fris: Armour, Music And Playing Cards
The helmet is the first surprise. Set over a skull, it gives military protection a useless grandeur. Around it, Jan Fris arranges a violin, a recorder, playing cards, shells and a small classical figure. The mixture reaches across several pleasures and ambitions: music, gaming, collecting and the prestige of arms.
The statuette offers an especially telling comparison. It presents a complete, idealised body beside a fragment of an actual one. The helmet, meanwhile, retains the form and splendour of protection after there is no one left to protect. These relationships give the objects their force; they do not need to be read as isolated entries in a dictionary of symbols.
Fris also makes the possessions attractive. Warm wood, pale shell and dark metal provide a variety of surfaces to enjoy. The eye can linger over them before returning to the skull. That movement is characteristic of vanitas: pleasure in the painted objects is part of the experience of recognising their limits.
The shop lists this composition as 1672. A matching institutional record establishing that year has not been identified, so the broader seventeenth-century dating is used in the discussion.
An Anonymous Still Life: A Curtain Drawn Aside
A curtain has been drawn aside. Behind it sit a skull on a book, a long bone and an hourglass. Compared with Fris’s crowded display, this arrangement feels enclosed and private. The curtain gives the encounter a sense of discovery, as though the objects have been waiting out of sight.
The Mauritshuis catalogues the painting as an anonymous work from the Northern Netherlands, made around 1650. Its ownership history records a nineteenth-century attribution to Rembrandt; that earlier opinion is not the museum’s present attribution. It is a useful reminder that the history of a painting includes changes in how it has been understood and named.
Within the picture, little can be named with certainty. The book is closed, the skull has no identity, and the bone has been separated from its body. The soft curtain gives these hard, still objects an unexpectedly intimate setting. We are brought close to them without being given a story about the person whose life they might recall.
Antonio De Pereda: Power And Mortality
The small portrait held by Pereda’s winged figure is a key to this lavish arrangement. The Kunsthistorisches Museum identifies it as Emperor Charles V. Held above a globe, it takes the subject beyond personal possessions to the scale of imperial power. Even authority over territories offers no exemption from time.
Painted around 1634, the work gathers armour, books, skulls, jewels, coins, portraits and an elaborate clock around the central figure. The museum records the words NIL OMNE—“all is nothing”—beside the hourglass. The inscription gives a blunt conclusion to a picture that takes considerable trouble to make worldly things look magnificent.
The clock is worth pausing over. An expensive instrument for measuring time becomes evidence of the owner’s inability to control it. Armour presents a related problem: it can defend a living body, but it has no answer to the skulls nearby. Books bring learning into the same company as wealth and military distinction.
Pereda’s colour and handling prevent the warning from becoming a dry lesson. Fabric gleams; metal catches light; small precious objects demand inspection. The painting understands the appeal of what it questions. Its authority comes partly from letting the viewer feel that appeal.
Carstian Luyckx: Death Among The Instruments Of Power
A standing skeleton presides over this enormous inventory of human activity. Instruments and books fill the foreground; a crown, ecclesiastical headgear, armour and banners introduce the signs of rank. Several skulls gather above them. The red curtain makes the whole display resemble a ceremony whose purpose has become disquieting.
Luyckx allows us to recognise distinctions that the skeleton renders temporary. The crown and mitre belong to different kinds of authority; armour belongs to another. Their meanings remain legible, but their owners are absent. What survives in the picture is the equipment of importance.
The density is deliberate. Open books, curved instruments and overlapping objects keep the eye moving, offering more detail than can be absorbed at once. Yet no quantity of possessions makes the bones disappear. The painting’s abundance becomes part of its warning.
It is possible to seek a specific political event behind the banners and armour, but such an identification needs documentary support. The visible contrast is already powerful: objects associated with command, learning and pleasure surround a body that can use none of them.
Carstian Luyckx: The Globe And The Collector
This still life contains no skull. Its largest object is a globe, set against a red curtain above an open illustrated book. Shells, a snake and butterflies complete the arrangement. The subject depends on the relationship between knowledge, collecting and the living world, rather than on an obvious emblem of death.
The type of globe makes a difference. Although the shop title calls it celestial, the Sotheby’s catalogue for this composition identifies a terrestrial globe: it maps the earth. The catalogue also records Fred Meijer’s confirmation of the attribution to Luyckx.
The globe and book offer two ways of organising knowledge. One turns geography into a small sphere; the other places images and information between covers. The shells can be admired as natural specimens and as possessions brought into a collection. Together, these objects suggest a world studied and assembled within an interior.
The creatures complicate that orderly display. A butterfly is delicate and mobile; a snake coils across the arrangement. Their presence makes the picture less settled than its heavy globe and book first suggest. Rather than assigning each a single fixed meaning, consider how their scale and movement alter the things beside them.
Gottfried Libalt: A Still Life Of Skulls
In Human Skulls, the accompanying possessions have gone. Nine skulls form the entire still life. The shop attributes the composition to Gottfried Libalt and places it around 1660; an independent collection record for this exact image has not been established here.
The arrangement rewards close inspection. Some skulls face towards us; others turn to reveal the dome, side or underside. Light distinguishes smooth curves from seams, broken openings and missing parts. The group is compact, but its individual forms are surprisingly varied.
A single skull can quickly become a familiar sign. Several together invite comparison. The differences in angle and condition make it harder to regard them as interchangeable objects. The picture acquires its gravity through this patient attention to physical remains, without the usual books, instruments or hourglass to guide the reading.
Skull And Rosary: A Devotional Still Life
Cloth surrounds the skull like a hood, lending it the outline of a person. Beside it are a closed book, a rosary and a crucifix. The arrangement, catalogued as nineteenth century, belongs to the devotional side of mortality imagery.
A rosary is an object used through repeated handling. Its beads help give prayer a sequence and rhythm. Here they lead across the foreground towards the crucifix, bringing the skull into the company of familiar religious practices. For a Christian viewer, reflection on death could be part of preparing the soul and considering how life should be lived.
The picture’s closeness is striking. The beads, worn book and folds of fabric seem within reach. This makes the subject feel like an encounter at a private table, although the image alone does not establish where the work was originally displayed or who commissioned it. Its effect comes from placing a difficult thought among objects that might be used every day.
Paula Wildhack: A Nineteenth-Century Return To Vanitas
Paula Wildhack painted this Memento Mori in 1894. The record for the original painting describes an oil on panel, signed and dated at the lower right. More than two centuries after the familiar Dutch vanitas tables, the combination of skull, books and devotional objects still offered a subject worth revisiting.
Wildhack builds the arrangement upwards. Books support the skull; an open Bible leans towards the viewer; a candlestick rises behind. A crucifix lies on the patterned cloth, and white flowers provide a lighter passage on the right. The crowded grouping and richly worked fabric give the scene a domestic warmth.
That warmth makes the skull less remote. It occupies a setting of reading, prayer and decoration, rather than an empty darkness. Pale petals and exposed teeth catch the light in small, distinct shapes. The yellowing edges of the pages add another indication of age, quieter than the bone but woven into the same scene.
The painting shows how an established subject could remain useful without becoming identical in every artist’s hands. Wildhack retains recognisable objects from the tradition while giving them the colour, texture and proximity of a particular interior arrangement.
A Printed Reminder: The Skeleton With A Plaque
This skeleton has something to tell us. Wrapped in a shroud, it gestures across a plaque of writing beneath an architectural arch. The lettering includes Memento mori memorare novissima, joining remembrance of death with reflection on the last things. The warning is both pictured and written.
The Wellcome Collection catalogues the sheet as a mezzotint with engraving and records Johann Christian Leopold’s publication imprint. This identifies the publisher; it should not automatically be treated as the name of the artist or engraver.
The dark tonal field gives the bones a startling presence. The skeleton’s hand resembles the gesture of a teacher drawing attention to a text, while its own body supplies the subject of the lesson. Unlike the still lifes that invite a viewer to work out a relationship among objects, this print makes instruction its central action. A printed sheet also offered a different form of encounter from a painting, carrying image and words together on paper.
C. A. Jensen: Skull And Hourglass
Jensen pares the subject back to two objects. A skull rests on a warm red-brown surface, with a wooden hourglass beside it. There are no signs of rank, no pile of money and no crowded account of human accomplishment. The small arrangement is enough.
The collection metadata supplied by Statens Museum for Kunst dates the painting to 1810–1814 and records its exhibition at Charlottenborg in 1814. At about 33 by 39 centimetres, it retains the intimacy of an object study.
Look at the difference between the two forms. The hourglass is a construction, with regular wooden supports enclosing its glass. The skull is irregular: light picks out the curve of the forehead and the thinner edges around the eye socket. Jensen gives both a solid presence before their familiar meaning takes hold.
The painting is a reminder that vanitas need not be visually complicated. There is pleasure in observing how a surface receives light, even when the object carries an unsettling association. Here the simplicity gives that observation room.
L. A. Ring: The Catacombs At Palermo
Ring’s title names a place: the Capuchin convent at Palermo. That specificity changes the experience. These are not skulls gathered on a studio table to stand for mortality in general. The picture shows clothed remains, labels and a wooden barrier, retaining the circumstances of their display.
Painted in 1894 and now in Statens Museum for Kunst, the work is uncomfortable partly because the three figures are so different. Their heads lean at different angles. Some features are reduced to exposed bone; the figure at the right retains more of a recognisable face. Clothing continues to suggest the bodies beneath it.
The word “skulls” in the title does not quite prepare us for this persistence of human appearance. Labels and garments keep the remains connected to identities, even when those identities are unavailable to us. Ring brings the subject from the language of emblems into the experience of looking at particular dead people. That is what distinguishes the work from the carefully assembled vanitas still lifes around it.
Frans Hals: A Young Man Holding A Skull
The young man seems caught in the middle of speaking. His mouth is open, his hand reaches towards the viewer and a long feather sweeps above his cap. Hals gives him the movement and colour of a lively presence. The skull in his other hand becomes more striking because the figure holding it appears so fully alive.
The National Gallery dates the painting to 1626–1628 and identifies it as an allegory rather than a portrait. It also rejects the old identification of the youth as Hamlet. A theatrical costume and a skull can suggest Shakespeare to a modern viewer, but they do not establish that subject.
Here the contrast is carried by bodies rather than possessions. Skin and bone, movement and stillness, youth and its eventual end occupy the same space. Hals’s broad brushwork contributes to the sense that we have encountered someone briefly, before his gesture changes.
The choice of a young figure gives the reminder particular force. Death is not presented as a concern confined to old age. It is held by somebody whose appearance suggests that he has plenty of life ahead of him.
Charles Allan Gilbert: All Is Vanity
At first, there is a woman seated at her dressing table. Step back—or let your attention relax from the small details—and a skull emerges. Her head and its reflection form the eye sockets. The mirror provides the upper outline. Once both images have been recognised, it is difficult to keep either one entirely out of sight.
Gilbert’s All Is Vanity, commonly dated 1892, turns an old subject into a problem of perception. He does not put a skull on the dressing table. He makes the woman, furniture and reflection produce one. The act of attending to an appearance becomes the material of the warning.
The title works in two senses. It refers to concern with personal appearance, but it also recalls the wider vanitas idea that worldly things are temporary. The woman’s ordinary routine is therefore part of a much older reflection on mortality.
The image remains engaging because its effect must be discovered. A description can explain the illusion, but the viewer still has to see it happen. The brief adjustment between room and skull makes the warning an experience, rather than simply a statement read beneath a picture.
José Segrelles: From Still Life To Nightmare
With Segrelles, the table has become a landscape of bones. Skulls rise into a tower, long bones spill through the foreground and winged forms hover at the side. The scale is impossible to reconcile with the quiet domestic arrangements seen earlier. Mortality has become the material of a nightmare.
The shop calls the work Pile of Skulls and dates it around 1920. The Sitges exhibition catalogue includes a Tower of Skulls dated 1921. Without a confirmed match between the two entries, the broader early-twentieth-century date is retained here.
The comparison with Libalt is useful. Both compositions multiply skulls, but to very different ends. Libalt’s compact group encourages inspection of individual forms. Segrelles makes the accumulation difficult to measure. Its upper reaches disappear into darkness, and the winged skulls break the stillness altogether.
A related print in the collection, Mors Triumphans, catalogued as Leonard Bramer, c. 1650, presents death as a victorious rider. These works show how far memento mori imagery can travel from still life into allegory and fantasy. The skull remains recognisable, but the kind of encounter has changed.
How To Look At A Vanitas Painting
Start with what you can see. Which object receives the strongest light? What has been put beside it? A skull under a helmet makes a different argument from a skull beside a rosary. The arrangement often tells us more than a list of supposed meanings.
Then look for signs of use. Peschier’s open music and smouldering lamp suggest an interruption. Bonnecroy’s palette and addressed letter bring in a working life. Ring’s labels and clothing preserve the setting in which remains were displayed. These details give a familiar subject its particular character.
Finally, allow yourself to enjoy the painting. Admiring the glass, cloth, wood or shell does not mean missing the point. Their attraction is often what makes the subject effective. A vanitas asks us to consider the things we value while giving those things an extraordinary degree of attention. Centuries later, that attention can still bring us closer to the lives in which they mattered.
Common Questions About Still Life And Memento Mori
Is Every Skull Painting A Vanitas?
No. Skulls also appear in anatomical studies, religious scenes, portraits and fantastic images. The term vanitas is most useful when a work reflects on the passing of life and the limits of possessions, pleasure or achievement. Its context matters as much as any single object.
Why Do Vanitas Paintings Include Musical Instruments?
Music is a pleasure that unfolds and disappears in time. Instruments and scores can outlast a performance or a player, making them useful companions to a skull or hourglass. They can also suggest education, status and the cultivated life. Their role depends on the rest of the picture.
What Is The Difference Between Vanitas And Memento Mori?
Memento mori is the broad reminder that we must die. Vanitas considers what that means for the things pursued during life, including wealth, beauty, learning and power. Still life is one of the artistic forms used to explore these ideas.
About The Illustrations. Captions follow museum attributions and dates where these are established. Identifications drawn only from the shop catalogue are noted. Links to collection records and other sources appear alongside the relevant works; readings of composition and symbolism are the author’s interpretations. The illustrations show the artworks themselves, with links to the corresponding prints beneath them.