Vanitas

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This article is about the fine art genre. For the pejorative name for the political party, see Veritas (political party)

In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic still life painting commonly executed by Northern European painters in Flanders and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term vanitas itself refers to the arts, learning and time. The word is Latin, meaning "vanity." Ecclesiastes 1:2 from the Bible is often quoted in conjunction with this term. From the Vulgate Bible, we get Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. This is translated to Vanity of vanities; all is vanity by the King James Version of the Bible, and Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless by the New International Version of the Bible.

Paintings executed in the vanitas style are meant as a reminder of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, encouraging a sombre world view.

Common vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certainty of death; rotten fruit, which symbolizes decay; bubbles, which symbolize the brevity of life and suddenness of death; smoke, watches, and hourglasses, which symbolize the brevity of life; and musical instruments, which symbolize brevity and the ephemeral nature of life.

The first movement in composer Robert Schumann's 5 Pieces in a Folk Style, for Cello and Piano, Op. 103, is entitled Vanitas vanitatum. Mit Humor.