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Vanitas
The theme of “vanitas” (vanity) is very popular in European art, in different centuries. Vanitas in art is a representation that shows together life and death, the begin and the end, beauty and the corruption of the same; examples of vanitas paintings are still lives with a skull near to flowers or fruit, or near a beautiful woman (in this case, if the woman brings the skull in her hand, it will become an allegory of the melancholy of life). Also a genius like Caravaggio knows very well the mechanism of vanitas when he paints the Boy bitten by a lizard : the bit of the animal becomes the symbol of the corruption of the youngness, like the presence of an insect on the apple in the very famous painting Basket of fruit of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana (Ambrosiana Painting Gallery) of Milan (Italy). [E] [ES] [F] [I] . Also the presence of musical instruments in still lives (we can in particular remember the paintings realized by Evaristo Baschenis [ES] [I] [E] in XVII century) or in paintings showing a girl who plays a guitar or another instrument, are allegory of vanitas: in fact, a note played with an instrument is beautiful and poetic to be heard, but it finishes in a few seconds lost in the air: in the same way time pass over everything.
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