A type of still life painting, symbolic of mortality, characteristic of Dutch painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.(noun)
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Use "vanitas" in a sentence
"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."