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A vanitas is a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, often contrasting symbols of wealth and symbols of ephemerality and death. Vanitas pictures flourished in the seventeenth century when variants can be found in Protestant Holland and Catholic Flemish, Italian and Spanish territories. The present painting was registered in the nineteenth century as a work by Guido Reni, later it was thought to be by a follower of Caravaggio such as Artimisia Gentileschi or Johann Liss. Now it is catalogued as a painting by the Franco-Flemish Nicolas Regnier active in Rome and Venice.
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