Vanitas Objects: A Symbol Dictionary

How this dictionary was compiled

A symbol list on the open web tends to treat every object as a one-word gloss: rose equals love, skull equals death, book equals learning. That method fails in front of a real picture. The same rose, in a vanitas, is already cut and already wilting. The same book may be a well-thumbed psalm book or an unread folio stacked as furniture. This dictionary therefore states its rules before the entries. You should know why a prop made the list, which picture is being used as a citation, and where the gloss stops.

The working set is the independent Dutch and Flemish vanitas still life of the seventeenth century, with a few later pictures that reuse the same props on purpose. An object earns a full entry if it appears as a readable actor in more than one well-published work, if a museum catalogue or glossary assigns it a moral function, and if that function can be shown in a named picture rather than in a free-floating list. One-off studio jokes stay out. So do objects whose only job is to display the painter's skill with pewter or linen, unless a catalogue also gives them a vanitas sense.

What counted as a vanitas object

Inclusion required three tests. First, recurrence: the object appears across Leiden, Haarlem, Amsterdam or The Hague tables, not in one eccentric canvas. Second, moral work: Tate's glossary draws the line. A memento mori still life can stop at skulls and extinguished candles. A vanitas still life adds instruments, wine and books so the viewer also reads the worthlessness of worldly goods. Third, a named citation: each full entry is tied to a picture whose collection page or catalogue discusses that object. Five works form the spine: Jacques de Gheyn II, Vanitas Still Life, 1603 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974.1); Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628 (Met, 49.107); Harmen Steenwyck, Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life, about 1640 (National Gallery, London, NG1256); Jan Jansz. Treck, Vanitas Still Life, 1648 (NG6533); David Bailly, Vanitas still life with portrait of a young painter, 1651 (Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, S 1351). Edward Collier's Still Life with a Volume of Wither’s ‘Emblemes’, 1696 (Tate N05916), named on Tate's vanitas glossary page, covers the English afterlife of the type. The glossary image works; the main collection URL has been unstable, so cite N05916 and the glossary together. The list is a working set, not a census of every goblet.

How citations were chosen, and what was left out

Museum collection pages and handbook essays took priority over undated student blogs. The Met calls de Gheyn 1603 the earliest known independent still-life painting of a vanitas subject. National Gallery in-depth texts for NG1256 and NG6533 name objects and give the Ecclesiastes frame. De Lakenhal's record for S 1351 names candle, bubbles, skull, flowers, hourglass, silver bekerschroef, dukats and pearls, and prints Vanitas vani(ta)tum et omnia vanitas. De Lakenhal, in 2024–25 exhibition copy, still treats the identity of Bailly's young painter as open: a colleague, or Bailly at an earlier age. This dictionary does not close that question.

Left out on purpose: genre history (sibling); wider memento mori culture (S16-01); general flower language (S16-10); city or market commentary; any MENA symbol inventory. Snakes appear in some popular lists and are rare in the five spine pictures, so they do not get a full entry.

How to use this dictionary in front of a picture

Stand at a comfortable distance first. A vanitas is an argument in clusters, not a row of flashcards. Steenwyck loads the lower right of NG1256 with lute, flask, sword, books and skull, then leaves the upper left almost empty except for a shaft of light. The National Gallery's catalogue reads that diagonal as the contrast between piled goods and vacancy. If you jump to "skull equals death" and stop, you miss the sentence the painter wrote with empty space.

Then move in. Note the state of each object: upright or overturned, lit or smoking, new or thumbed, cut or growing. Treck turns the hourglass, the helmet and the skull off their expected axes. The Gallery's text says those objects are meant to be seen upright; to see them upset is the point. A burning candle and a snuffed candle are different signs. A closed new book and a book with crumpled pages are different signs. A bubble still intact and a straw waiting beside a shell of soap are different stages of the same idea.

Read clusters, not single props

Painters group timekeepers with death signs, and luxury with learning. In Claesz 1628 the skull, the toppled roemer and the smoking wick sit on one pitted ledge; the Met's label treats them as one sentence about brevity. In Steenwyck the pocket watch and the snuffed lamp flank the skull, while the lute, shawm and flask sit behind as pleasures already set aside. In Bailly the hourglass, snuffed candle and bubbles handle time and fragility; the dukats and pearls handle possession; the flute, lute print, flowers, glass and pipe handle the five senses. De Lakenhal's object text spells that sensory programme out. Read pearls with the snuffed candle and you get wealth that ends.

Treck places costly lacquer, a Rhenish jug and a gold-and-silver scarf beside the skull, then lets a drawing of a man slide off the shelf upside down. The Gallery's annual-report extract (1990–91) and later handbook text both insist that the picture warns against luxury and, in the same breath, that art (including Treck's own panel) will outlast the drinker and the smoker. That second claim is a painter's boast as much as a sermon. Keep both in view.

The state of the object changes the sense

Catalogues are specific about condition. Claesz's lamp is guttering; Steenwyck's lamp trails a thin smudge of smoke; Treck's pipe still shows embers; Bailly's candle is out. Extinction in progress is the vanitas favourite, because it shows the instant rather than the abstract fact. Flowers are cut, not rooted. Fruit, when it appears, is already past peak. The hourglass in Treck is overturned, so even the machine for measuring time has been knocked off its job. The watch in Steenwyck is open, as if someone had been checking it and walked away.

The same object outside a vanitas table can be innocent. A lute in a music-piece by a Utrecht Caravaggist is an instrument, not a sermon. A globe in a portrait of a geographer is a tool of trade. A skull in an anatomy lesson is a specimen. You decide you are in vanitas territory when mortality signs and worldly goods share one shallow stage, and when a label or inscription (Ecclesiastes, homo bulla, a snuffed wick) confirms the moral frame. If the picture is a breakfast piece with a single watch tucked among pewter, the Met's Heilbrunn essay on northern still life (1600–1800) treats that watch as an intellectual conceit more than a pulpit warning. Do not drag every Dutch table into this dictionary.

Object index and picture citations

The first table is the working key. "Usual sense" is the sense catalogues give when the object sits in a vanitas cluster. "Typical state" is what painters tend to show. "Citation" is the picture used in the entries below. Timekeepers are easy to confuse: hourglass (sand, sometimes overturned), watch (open luxury machine), lamp or candle (read the wick), bubble (homo bulla, not a toy). A sundial is rarer; do not treat every disc as a watch.

The second table is the citation file: where to look the pictures up.

Steenwyck NG1256 and Treck NG6533 were listed as not on display on the National Gallery site at the time of writing; check before you travel. Bailly S 1351 was on view in the Rembrandtzaal. Met gallery numbers change with hangs.

Mortality on the table: skull, glass, flame and bubble

The five objects in this section do the time-and-death work. Painters can build a complete vanitas from them alone, as Claesz does on a ledge less than forty centimetres wide. They also anchor the busier Leiden tables. Read them first, then add luxury.

Skull. National Gallery copy for Steenwyck NG1256 puts the viewer "staring death in the face": a shaft of light hits empty sockets and a gap-toothed grin, the cranium lolling on the table edge. Claesz in 1628 works smaller and greyer; the Met stresses close observation against explicit symbolism, and the pitted stone ledge that joins the picture space to yours. Treck overturns the skull, stains it, knocks out teeth, and sets a withered straw garland on the brow: honour dries on the head that wore it. The reason for a full entry is the company the bone keeps. In an anatomy theatre it is a teaching specimen. In a Crucifixion it can be Adam's skull at Golgotha. In a vanitas it is your future among goods you still want. Steenwyck's X-radiograph, in the Gallery's Dutch School catalogue line, shows a wreath-crowned bust (read as an emperor) later covered by a flask. The skull won the fight for attention. Ask whether worldly goods and timekeepers share the stage before you file every painted skull here.

Hourglass. Treck's hourglass is overturned on the stone shelf, crossed by a clay pipe from an overturned helmet. The Gallery treats that upset as designed: these objects have a right way up, and the painter denies it. Bailly keeps the glass among candle, bubbles and skull; De Lakenhal lists it for the transience of life on earth. Sand is time you can watch. The upper bulb has a visible end unless someone turns the glass. Overturning it in paint freezes even that reset. Blogs collapse hourglass with watch. Catalogues do not. The glass is the older moral image, used in allegories of Temperance and Death. The watch is a fashionable machine. When both appear you have two clocks. If only the glass is present, do not invent a pocket watch in the meaning. The reason for inclusion is that split: same theme (time), different object class (proverb versus goldsmith's work).

Pocket watch. Steenwyck sets an open pocket watch near the sword hilt, in the National Gallery audio-description inventory. The catalogue pairs it with the snuffed lamp: smoke for a life just ended, the watch for time that keeps going without you. The Met Heilbrunn essay on northern still life (1600–1800) flags a different case. In Abraham van Beyeren's lobster still life of the 1650s (Met 1971.254), a pocket watch can be "more of an intellectual conceit than a sober warning." A watch among ham and lemon may be a witty reminder. A watch beside a skull and a dead lamp is a sentence about remaining minutes. The watch earns its entry because it is both luxury (spring-driven, cased, worn on a chain) and timekeeper. Read both facts. Without the mortality cluster, leave this dictionary on the hook.

Snuffed candle and oil lamp. Claesz's 1628 lamp still shows a guttering wick. The Met's sentence groups toppled glass, gap-toothed skull and guttering wick as "stark symbols of life's brevity." Steenwyck's lamp, behind the skull, releases a wisp of smoke; the Gallery reads it as just burnt out or just extinguished. Bailly's candle is out. Treck prefers pipe embers, the same idea in another fuel. The favourite moment is the second after the flame goes, when smoke still draws a line. Lit flame and dead flame are different signs. A burning candle on an altar can mean vigil. In a vanitas cluster the painter wants the pinch. Popular lists say "candle equals death" and stop. Look at the wick. Inclusion rests on that visible instant of extinction, which catalogues describe with care and blogs flatten.

Soap bubble. De Gheyn 1603 puts a large bubble beside the skull in a stone niche. Images float inside it, including a wheel of torture and a leper's rattle, which the Met reads as human folly. The bubble is the homo bulla emblem: man is a bubble. Treck places a straw and a shell of liquid on a music book; the Gallery calls bubble-blowing a known symbol for brevity. Bailly fills the air with rising bubbles; De Lakenhal assigns them to sight, and to fragility. Museum prose treats the 1603 panel as the first independent painted vanitas in the Netherlands, so the bubble belongs near the front of the dictionary. It also lets the painter show a transparent sphere and a highlight that sits on nothing. Skill and sermon share the same film of water. Inclusion is recurrence plus that early Met citation, which student lists almost never name.

Pleasure, learning and trade

Once mortality is on the table, the rest of the objects explain what death makes vain. Tate's glossary is the short version: musical instruments, wine and books remind the viewer of the worthlessness of worldly pleasures and goods. Dutch buyers also valued the sheen of those goods. Painters served both demands. Flower language as a subject across centuries of art is a separate article; here flowers appear as cut matter on a vanitas stage.

Cut flowers. De Gheyn already wilts them beside the 1603 niche. Bailly, per De Lakenhal, uses wilting flowers for transience and again as smell among the five senses. Treck's skull wears the remains of a garland. The vanitas flower is not a Middelburg botanical portrait and not a love-token from a general flower book. It is a living thing already separated from its root. Keep species tables for flower symbolism in art. Inclusion here is the cut and the wilt, cited in those three pictures. If the picture is a vase of flowers with a skull tucked in, you are on the border of flower piece and vanitas. Jan Davidsz. de Heem worked that border. Read the skull and the timekeepers first. A rose on this table is not "love" unless a catalogue says so.

Musical instruments. Steenwyck's table, in the Gallery in-depth text, holds a recorder inscribed with a capital A, an upturned lute, and a shawm. Treck includes a recorder, a viol and its bow. Bailly uses a flute and a print of a lute player; De Lakenhal assigns them to hearing. Music exists only while it is played. An upturned lute is a silenced instrument. Tate names instruments as the extra that turns a memento mori still life into a vanitas still life. That is the reason for inclusion: without the lute and the book, you may have mortality signs alone. A skull plus a lute says the concert ends. In other genres a lute is a studio prop or a lover's attribute. Here the test is the cluster.

Books, sheets and quill. Claesz lays a writing quill beside the skull; the Met lets that adjacency work: even the words we leave outlast us by little. Steenwyck contrasts a book that looks new with one that is thumbed; the Gallery reads ageing, and learning as endeavour that remains futile beside faith. Treck slides the title page of a play by Theodore Rodenburgh down the stack; the Gallery translates it as "Evil is its Own Reward," and sets a music book under the bubble straw. Collier, in the English sequel Tate names, paints Wither's Emblemes: the book is object and printed moral. Inclusion rests on that range. "Book equals knowledge" is too thin. Ask which book, whether it is read, and whether a quill or a title page is doing extra work. A closed folio stacked as furniture is not the same sign as a title you can read.

Coins, pearls and gold work. De Lakenhal is blunt about Bailly: the silver bekerschroef, gold dukats and pearls "remind us of the finitude of earthly possession." That sentence is why coins get their entry from Leiden rather than from a generic treasure list. Pearls sit in portraits as status. On Bailly's table they sit with a snuffed candle and an Ecclesiastes paper, so status is already under sentence. Treck's gold-and-silver scarf and lacquer box do similar work without minted coin. Pewter and herring may be a breakfast piece. Dukats beside a skull belong here. Inclusion is museum language plus the need to stop readers treating every gleam as "wealth" with no expiry. The expiry is the point.

Globe, map, and the philosophers' niche. De Gheyn 1603 sets the still life in a stone niche and places Democritus and Heraclitus, the laughing and weeping philosophers, on the arch. The Met reads them as commentary on the folly below. Images inside the bubble include a wheel of torture and a leper's rattle. Later tables add terrestrial globes as merchant pride: you can hold the world and still die. A globe in a vanitas is not a geography lesson. It is the claim that the world, as an object of study and trade, belongs with the other vain goods. Inclusion follows de Gheyn's status as the type's opening move, and the need to stop readers treating every sphere as a bubble or a watch. If the sphere is soap, use the bubble entry. If it has meridians, use this one.

Clay pipe, tobacco, helmet and import goods. Treck's spent pipe projects from an overturned helmet and crosses the hourglass; embers still burn. The Gallery groups smoking with drinking and dress as luxuries worthless in the face of death. Bailly's pipe, in De Lakenhal's sensory list, belongs with taste and the filled glass. Steenwyck's Japanese sword in a lacquer sheath is, the Gallery says, an expensive import; the tropical shell is a collector's piece and, like the skull, a remainder of a life. Treck's black lacquer box and Rhenish jug do the same job of gleam and cost. Inclusion is catalogue evidence of a trading republic looking at its cargo and writing Ecclesiastes on it. Helmet without a head, pipe without a smoker, shell without the creature, sword without a hand: empty equipment. These props are easy to file as decoration. The catalogues do not.

Confusions that wreck a reading

Three mix-ups turn up in classrooms and on the search results that rank for "vanitas symbols meaning." Student blogs from 2016 still occupy the top organic slots in US Google for that phrase, and they flatten roses into "love, sensuality, vanity and sex" without a picture. Use the museum tables instead.

Vanitas and memento mori share bones. Tate's glossary keeps the distinction that this series also keeps. Memento mori ("remember you must die") can be a skull on a tomb, a dance of death, or a still life that stops at mortality signs. Vanitas is the still-life argument that worldly goods and pleasures are vain, built on Ecclesiastes, with instruments, wine, books and treasures added to the skull and the dead flame. If you want the wider cultural history, go to the memento mori article. If you want how the Dutch type formed as a genre, go to vanitas painting explained. This page stays with objects.

A breakfast piece with a watch is not automatic vanitas. Haarlem painters such as Claesz and Willem Claesz. Heda built monochrome banquets in which a lemon peel, a roemer and a watch can carry a light moral without a skull. The Met's Heilbrunn essay calls some of those watches conceits. Look for the mortality cluster before you apply this dictionary.

Flower still life is a neighbouring industry. A vase by Ambrosius Bosschaert is a display of specimens, insects and drops of water. It can admit a vanitas reading (every bloom is cut), and some pictures add a skull to force the point. A general flower-symbolism guide will handle species and Marian or love codes. Here, wilt and cut are the whole claim.

English "vanity" in daily speech means conceit about looks. Ecclesiastes vanitas is broader: emptiness, futility, vapour. A mirror can serve both. In a vanitas table a mirror is less common than blogs suggest. Do not import a modern makeup-vanity reading into 1640 Leiden.

The painter's skill is part of the meaning. Gallery texts for Steenwyck and Treck spend as many sentences on lacquer, metal and crumpled paper as on death. Viewers were expected to admire the imitation and then accept the warning.

After the Golden Age: later artists and the same props

The independent Dutch vanitas table thins in the eighteenth century. The props do not retire. Painters and photographers pick them up as a known language. This section is a pointer, not a second history of the genre. The test is reuse of the dictionary objects with the moral still legible, or with an argument against that moral.

Paul Cézanne's Pyramid of Skulls of about 1901, and related table-top skulls, keep the bone and drop the hourglass sermon. His interest is form, interval and the studio skull as a shape among apples. The Dutch pictures were already part of studio culture. Pablo Picasso's Goat's Skull, Bottle and Candle (1952), listed among Tate's selected works on the vanitas glossary page, returns candle and skull to a cubist table. The candle-and-skull cluster is intact even when the Leiden furniture is gone.

Studio skulls from Cézanne to Picasso

Cézanne's skulls sit in the same shallow space as his fruit. Picasso's goat skull with bottle and candle compresses Treck's ember-and-bone idea into a few planes. Neither artist needs a pocket watch. The dictionary still helps: you see which props they kept (skull, candle, vessel) and which they discarded (bubble, ducat, Japanese sword). A modern still life that keeps only the skull is closer to memento mori than to full vanitas unless other vain goods return. If you meet a twentieth-century table with a lute, a newspaper and a skull, apply the cluster rule before you claim a Dutch revival. Cubism had its own reasons to pile objects.

Photographers, photorealists and installation

Audrey Flack's Marilyn (Vanitas) of 1977 restages the table with lipstick, fruit, a photograph of Monroe, a watch and a candle. The objects are contemporary goods; the grammar is Leiden. Damien Hirst's diamond skull For the Love of God (2007) keeps bone and hoard, with no hourglass. It sits closer to a reliquary than to a Steenwyck ledge, but the two strongest props in this dictionary are the two it keeps. When a living artist piles phones around a plastic skull, use the list as a measure: timekeepers and extinguished light still have to be doing work.

What the list reveals

The list is short. A dozen object types, five spine pictures, and a handful of later reuses cover the language. Vanitas is a closed set that painters permute. De Gheyn in 1603 already has skull, bubble, flowers and smoke. Leiden and Haarlem spend the next decades adding watch, lute, book, pipe, shell and coin, and arguing about empty space, as Steenwyck does with his diagonal.

The goods that "die" on the table are the goods of a trading, reading, music-playing, smoking, collecting public. Ecclesiastes is the frame; the cargo is Dutch. Catalogues for Steenwyck and Treck name Japanese sword, tropical shell, Rhenish stoneware, lacquer, gold thread. The sermon is aimed at people who own, or want to own, those things.

Sourcing for this page is the museum record set named in the tables: Met 1974.1 and 49.107; National Gallery NG1256 and NG6533 (MacLaren/Brown Dutch School catalogue line; Gallery in-depth and audio texts); Museum De Lakenhal S 1351; Tate's vanitas glossary (Ecclesiastes quotation; Collier 1696; Picasso among selected works); the Met Heilbrunn essay on still-life painting in northern Europe, 1600–1800. Where De Lakenhal leaves Bailly's young painter unidentified, this page leaves him unidentified. Where the National Gallery lists Steenwyck and Treck as not on display, this page warns you to check. Popular one-word glossaries without pictures were used as a map of what searchers see, not as authorities.

FAQ

What is the symbolism of vanitas?
Vanitas symbolism is the use of still-life objects to argue that earthly life is brief and that worldly goods and pleasures are empty, after Ecclesiastes 1:2. Tate's glossary groups skulls and extinguished candles with the mortality reminder, then adds instruments, wine and books for the worthlessness of goods. A full table (Steenwyck NG1256, Bailly S 1351) combines both halves. This dictionary is the object-by-object key. Genre history is the sibling article.

What does vanitas stand for?
The word is Latin for emptiness or vanity in the biblical sense of vapour and futility, not only pride in appearance. Painters and patrons in the Dutch Republic used it as a label for a type of still life. Bailly writes the verse on a paper in S 1351: Vanitas vani(ta)tum et omnia vanitas. Museum labels still use "vanitas" as a genre name.

Are vanitas symbols the same as memento mori symbols?
They overlap. Skull, hourglass and dead candle serve both. Vanitas, as Tate draws the line, adds the vain goods. Memento mori as a wider cultural practice (tombs, jewellery, the dance of death) is a separate article in this series. If your picture has no worldly pile, you may be looking at memento mori without the full vanitas set.

Why do vanitas paintings include musical instruments and books?
Because the sermon is about pleasure and learning as well as death. Instruments stand for music that stops; books and quills for study and writing that will not exempt you. Tate names those extras on purpose. Steenwyck's lute and thumbed books, Claesz's quill, Treck's viol and play-title, Bailly's flute and lute print are the citations.

Do flowers in a vanitas mean love?
In this genre they mean beauty on a timer: cut, wilting, sometimes a garland already dry on a skull. De Gheyn, Bailly and Treck support that reading. Species-by-species love codes belong in the flower-symbolism article. A blog that tags every rose as "sensuality" without a picture is not a source.

Where can I see the pictures named here?
De Gheyn 1603 and Claesz 1628: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Steenwyck about 1640 and Treck 1648: National Gallery, London (check display status). Bailly 1651: Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden. Collier 1696 (N05916) and Picasso 1952: Tate. Use the museums directory for visiting information.