Monday evening, September 23, 2019.
Detail from “Vanitas Still Life” by Maria van Oosterwijck. 1688. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Via Wikipedia.
A typical still life of the time, painted [by Maria van Oosterwijck] in 1688, shows a gray-marble table with a slightly chipped edge. Assembled on it are household items that appear to have been picked up carelessly and left there: a bunch of flowers, a carafe of aqua vita (brandy), letters, an accounts ledger and some books, a celestial globe, an hourglass, a ginger jar being used as an inkwell, a purse---and a skull. This glinting hint from a dead man’s grin is almost unnecessary---for this is a painting about transience.
The finely executed flowers...will soon wilt, and even now the composition gives the impression that the flowers are sprouting from the bony hollow that once contained a brain. In the left corner, a head of wheat is being eyed by a mouse that will soon devour it, while the rattle, used by plague victims is a reminder of the fragility of happiness. The recorder receives its voice only from living, human breath, which will soon expire. The cob of corn...is already half eaten and the ginger jar...which once contained a rare delicacy offered to select guests, has come down in the world to less exalted service.
The...theme continues in the ledger, even if the astute observer already suspects that it contains not the bookkeeping of a wholesaler but rather a more existential tally, a register of sins…
The carafe of the left is filled with a red liquid not at all like clear, distilled alcohol. What then is this aqua vita, this elixir of life, that is kept inside? Is it liqueur or does the glass, fragile as the human body, contain a more precious liquid?...
The artist’s emblem is also part of the scene a Red Admiral butterfly, which has found life after death in the chrysalis...its quivering, powdery wings show their beautiful pattern but will soon be dust again. For a moment, the butterfly is sitting on the book that contains the accounts of people’s deeds and misdeeds. One moment later it will be gone.
---from “Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present" by Philipp Blom.
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