Escuela española del siglo XVII

17th century Spanish school.
"Vanitas".
Oil on canvas on its original canvas.
Exteriors cut.
Measurements: 31 x 40 cm.
To capture the fleetingness of life was one of the themes that most concerned the baroque painters. Vanities denounce the relativity of knowledge and the vanity of the human race subject to the passing of time, to death. This genre was particularly popular 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 moralising still lifes became very common as an indispensable complement to preaching and devotion in Europe, in forms and with slightly different intentions in Catholic and Protestant areas. The artist of the present composition offers us a skull, the quintessential symbol of the vanitas, stripped of any narrative element that might hinder its reading.