vanitas

American  

[van-i-tahs] / ˈvæn ɪˌtɑs /

noun

1. a type of still-life painting that flourished in the Netherlands from about 1620 to 1650, conveying a religious message and characterized by objects symbolic of mortality and the meaninglessness of worldly pleasures.

---

Etymology

Origin of vanitas

1905–10; Latin: literally, vanity

Example Sentences

Harnett had much simpler taste than his patrons, and while “Ease” is not a vanitas painting auguring death, he was known for incorporating traces of humor and irony in his paintings.

From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 28, 2025

Yet pronk works carried deeper meanings as the earliest forms of vanitas, a genre that uses symbolism to convey the brevity of life and futility of pleasure.

From Salon • Mar. 10, 2024

An artistic embodiment of vanitas, a reminder of death’s inevitability, they unspool films whose formal structures and abstract narratives are based on auction house categories for classifying and selling art.

From Los Angeles Times • Nov. 10, 2016

And trompe-l’oeil-painted plaster casts of partially eaten fruit are strewn everywhere — a dispersed vanitas that recalls Mr. Johns’s love of detail.

From New York Times • May 19, 2011

And he justified it by attributing to Bunyan a virile acceptance of life as a high and harsh adventure, while in Shakespeare he saw nothing but profligate pessimism, the vanitas vanitatum of a disappointed voluptuary.

From George Bernard Shaw by Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)