vanitas.

An artistic theme using symbols such as skulls or fading flowers to emphasize the transience of life and worldly pleasures.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• a vanitas painting
• vanitas imagery
• the vanitas tradition

On the page

The portrait's jewels made sense only beside the skull in its vanitas imagery.

Her still life borrowed the vanitas tradition but replaced the hourglass with a stalled digital clock.

Usage notes

Primary category: gothic. Forms: Usually uncountable for the theme or genre; describe multiple works as vanitas paintings. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings.