| In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic composition of painting or sculptures meant to be a reminder of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure and certainty of death. |
| Seen as examples of the vanitas genre, with soon-to-wilt flowers warning of the fleetingness of life, they may seem to belong to an obsolete moral universe. |
| In 1626 he moved to Leiden, where he painted vanitas subjects and increasingly adopted the monochrome palette of Haarlem still-life painters. |
| A classic vanitas, the painting reminds us that time and its consequences cannot be slowed. |
| The shift from vanitas to anatomical drawing was a critical moment. |
| In her straight-ahead photographs of storefronts, an arrangement of shoes or shrink-wrapped furniture becomes a vanitas still life. |
