Vanitas Still-Life

This painting is regarded as the earliest known vanitas still-life painted in the Netherlands. The genre flourished from the 1620s onward.

The dominant motifs in the picture are a human skull and, floating above it, a transparent sphere or bubble. These forms occupy a stone niche with a slightly pointed arch, the keystone of which is inscribed HVMANA VANA (Human Vanity). The spandrels flanking the arch are filled with sculptural figures of philosophers with books at their feet? to the left, Democritus, who gestures toward the globe and laughs; and, to the right, Heraclitus, who points to the sphere and weeps. The sphere purposefully resembles a soap bubble, the familiar vanitas motif. Two common vanitas symbols, cut flowers and smoke, rise from urns at either side of the niche. The coins depicted at the bottom of the composition on the sill between the vases were used as currency in the Netherlands about 1600. One of them, the silver medal of 1602 commemorates the capture of a Portuguese galleon by two Zeeland merchant ships earlier that year, off Saint Helena in the South Atlantic.

Democritus (c. 460 - c. 370 B.C.) and Heraclitus (c. 540 - c. 475 B.C.) are known as the 'laughing and crying philosophers.'

Democritus, a Greek philosopher, born at Abdera in Thrace, was known as the laughing philosopher because he found amusement in the folly of mankind. (The citizens of Abdera were proverbially stupid.) His philosophic system was contrasted with that of the earlier Heraclitus of Ephesus, who was known as the 'Dark' or 'Obscure' and was reputed to be melancholic. They were linked as a contrasting pair by Seneca, by Juvenal and others. Florentine humanists, to whom such classical texts were well-known used the pair to support the view that a cheerful demeanour was proper to a philosopher.

The two philosophers are widely represented in European painting of the Renaissance and Baroque period, either in one picture or as companion pieces. A fifteenth-century example is Bramante's fresco, but the subject was especially common in Dutch art of the seventeenth century.