Italian school; 17th century.

Italian school; XVII century.
"Vanitas".
Oil on panel.
It presents faults.
It has remains of anagram in the lower right area.
Measurements: 23 x 37 cm; 32 x 47 cm (frame).
To capture the transience of life was one of the themes that most concerned the baroque painters. The vanities denounce the relativity of knowledge and the vanity of the human race subject to the passage of time, to death. It is a genre especially practiced during the Baroque period, and its title and conception are related to a passage from Ecclesiastes: "vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas" ("vanity of vanities, all is vanity"). In the 17th century, these moralizing still lifes became very frequent as an indispensable complement to preaching and devotion in Europe, under forms and with slightly different intentions in Catholic and Protestant areas. The artist of the present composition offers us a skull, symbol par excellence of the vanitas, stripped of any narrative element that might hinder its reading.