Definition of "vanitas" []

• A type of still life painting, symbolic of mortality, characteristic of Dutch painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (noun)

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• "Some of her pictures are almost an updated index to the symbols used in vanitas, those treatises-in-oil that comment on the transience of time and earthly life: clocks, flickering candles, half-empty wine goblets."
• "The word vanitas referred to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity, so vanitas painting were full of symbols reflecting this depressing world view."
• "Brandon Dorman scatters the pages with objects found in Dutch vanitas paintings — a skull, a clock, flickering candles."