BOEL, Pieter
(b. 1622, Antwerpen, d. 1674, Paris)

Large Vanitas Still-Life

1663
Oil on canvas, 207 x 260 cm
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille

The painting shows a sarcophagus in a half-ruined church, with its vanishing point on the left. Objects of vanity are assembled in the foreground, piled up in the shape of a pyramid and culminating in an ermine coat, a turban (at the very top, at the banister, next to the skull), a royal crown, a mitre and a globe. These symbols of secular and ecclesiastical power at the zenith of the composition are further explained by a richly decorated bowl, worked by a goldsmith. It shows mythological scenes of unhappy love relationships, partly covering those 'vanitates' which are of lower order - a tambourine, lute, sabre, coat of mail and painter's palette, to name but a few. The statue of a mourning female figure in one of the niches bears great resemblance to the woman whose contours can be seen in Nicolas Poussin's famous self-portrait at the Louvre. She can be regarded as a late successor to the weeping women who surround the altar tomb of Philip the Bold in Dijon.

Pieter Boel's painting contains all the features normally associated with baroque solemnity, i.e. pomp and splendour even where power and wealth have become subject to the darkness of death. However, although all earthly possessions and authority are marked as vain, the dialectic of the painting never leaves any doubt that their real substance remains undisputed in this world and that the earthly order is preserved intact.




© Web Gallery of Art, created by Emil Krén and Daniel Marx.