Vanitas in the context of "Still life"

Memento mori (Latin for "remember (that you have) to die") is an artistic symbol or trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death. The concept has its roots in the philosophers of classical antiquity and Christianity, and appeared in funerary art and architecture from the medieval period onwards.

The most common motif is a skull, often accompanied by bones. Often, this alone is enough to evoke the trope, but other motifs include a coffin, hourglass, or wilting flowers to signify the impermanence of life. Often, these would accompany a different central subject within a wider work, such as portraiture; however, the concept includes standalone genres such as the vanitas and Danse Macabre in visual art and cadaver monuments in sculpture.

The Braque Triptych (or the Braque Family Triptych) is a c. 1452 oil-on-oak altarpiece by the Early Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden. When open, its three half-length panels reveal, from left to right, John the Baptist, The Virgin Mary with Jesus and Saint John the Evangelist, and Mary Magdalene. When the wings are closed, the work shows a vanitas motif of a skull and cross.

The Braque Triptych is the only surviving devotional work by van der Weyden known to be painted for private rather than public display. The altarpiece was probably commissioned by either Jehan Braque of Tournai or, more likely, his wife Catherine de Brabant – possibly after Jehan's sudden and early death in 1452. The couple had been married for only a brief period. Catherine was much younger than her husband; when they married in 1450 or early 1451, she was 20 and some 12 or 13 years his junior. She evidently held a deep and lasting affection for him. When she died, almost 50 years after him, she had asked to be buried alongside him, despite remarrying years earlier.

Vanity is the excessive belief in one's own abilities or attractiveness compared to others. Prior to the 14th century, it did not have such narcissistic undertones, and merely meant futility. The related term vainglory is now often seen as an archaic synonym for vanity, but originally meant considering one's own capabilities and that God's help was not needed, i.e. unjustified boasting; although glory is now seen as having a predominantly positive meaning, the Latin term from which it derives, gloria, roughly means boasting, and was often used as a negative criticism.

Clara Peeters (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈklaːraː ˈpeːtərs]; fl. 1607–1621) was a Flemish still-life painter from Antwerp who worked in both the Spanish Netherlands and Dutch Republic.

Peeters is the best-known female Flemish artist of this era and one of the few women artists working professionally in seventeenth-century Europe, despite restrictions on women's access to artistic training and membership in guilds. Peeters specialized in still-life paintings with food and was prominent among the artists who shaped the traditions of the Netherlandish ontbijtjes, "breakfast pieces," scenes of food and simple vessels, and banketjes, "banquet pieces" with expensive cups and vessels in precious metals.

Charles Allan Gilbert (September 3, 1873 – April 20, 1929), better known as C. Allan Gilbert, was an American illustrator. He is especially remembered for a widely published drawing (a memento mori or vanitas) titled All Is Vanity. The drawing employs a double image (or visual pun) in which the scene of a woman admiring herself in a mirror of her vanity table, when viewed from a distance, appears to be a human skull. The title is also a pun, as this type of dressing-table is also known as a vanity. The phrase "All is vanity" comes from Ecclesiastes 1:2 ("Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.") It refers to the vanity and pride of humans. In art, vanity has long been represented as a woman preoccupied with her beauty. And art that contains a human skull as a focal point is called a memento mori (Latin for "remember death"), a work that reminds people of their mortality.

It is less widely known that Gilbert was an early contributor to animation, and a camouflage artist (or camoufleur) for the U.S. Shipping Board during World War I.

Alexander Coosemans (1627, in Antwerp – 1689, in Antwerp) was a Flemish Baroque painter specialized in still lifes of flower pieces, fruit, and inanimate subjects. He painted vanitas still lifes, pronkstillevens and game pieces.
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Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts (1625/1629 – after 1675), was a Flemish painter who was active in the Spanish Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden in the second half of the seventeenth century. He was a court painter to the Danish royal family. He specialised in trompe-l'œil still lifes, an artistic genre which uses visual tricks to give viewers the illusion that they are not looking at a painting but rather at real three-dimensional objects. He also created many vanitas still lifes.