Description
The chart is an interactive lineage map. Vanitas sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.
For Vanitas (c. 1620 – 1650), it traces one movement that shaped it, a well-established link: Baroque.
Vanitas is a genre of memento mori symbolizing the transience of life, the uselessness of pleasure, and the certainty of death, and thus the vanity of ambition and all worldly desires. The paintings involved still life imagery of transitory items. The genre began in the 16th century and continued into the 17th century. Vanitas art is a type of allegorical art representing a higher ideal. It was a sub-genre of painting heavily employed by Dutch painters during the Baroque period (c.1585–1730). Spanish painters working at the end of the Spanish Golden Age also created vanitas paintings. Read more ↗
Key Artists
Famous Artworks
