Vanitas

Vanitas with Skull (Hendrick Andriessen, ca, 1600-1650, oil on panel)

Here is a simple but extremely lovely small still life painting by Hendrick Andriessen, a Flemish Baroque painter who specialized in “vanitas” paintings.  The entire composition is designed to remind the viewer how transient human life is.  The fragile pipe stems are easily broken (and tobacco’s pleasure is brief and tainted).  Each lovely cut flower withers away, The quivering flame is blown out…and nothing represents the dreadful onrushing nature of death like a human skull.  At the apex of the composition is a fragile bubble ready to burst.

As summer ends, this composition seems fitting in many ways (for example it was my birthday this past weekend).  Additionally, the bubble has symbolic significance in other realms than art.  We all knew the China bubble had to pop…..

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