A Rose a Day No. 42

Jan Davidsz. de Heem, ‘Vanitas Still-Life with a Skull, a Book and Roses’ (c.1630)

In Protestant countries, the ban on religious imagery obliged artists and their audience to develop other genres with an overtly moralizing content. In such cases, the beauty of the rose was often intended to remind the faithful that the pleasures of this life are transitory and fickle, a theme that derives from the Book of Ecclesiastes 1:2, which declares: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." A vanitas theme typically places wilting roses as a symbol of death in the company of, for example, a skull, butterflies (symbolizing transformation), or ruined parapets.

In Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s ‘Vanitas Still-Life with a Skull, a Book and Roses’ (c.1630), two cut Centifolia Rose flowers lie to the side of the book, skull, and a glass of water, adding a warm and beguiling note to the otherwise overwhelmingly austere and morbid composition. A vanitas painting conveyed to the prosperous patron who purchased it that the pleasure, money, beauty, and power they were enjoying in this world were not everlasting, and that it was the essence of earthly life to be fleeting and therefore fundamentally lacking in enduring value. But the message was ultimately meant to be one of hope, as on the other side of death for the faithful lay eternal life.

Source: http://collection.nationalmuseum.se/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=23891&viewType=detailView