Vanitas Still Life with the Spinario

Entry

In addition to breakfast and banquet pieces, quite a few vanitas still lifes have survived from Pieter Claesz’s early period.³ Most of them are simple compositions with a skull and bones, large yellowed books, an empty or overturned glass, a watch, a small oil lamp that has just been snuffed out, a quill pen, and occasionally musical instruments, often a violin.

In this rather complex still life set in a corner of a room, some of those objects are on a table covered with a green cloth, while the musical instruments are on the floor. Pieter Claesz also added several attributes of painting and drawing: a palette laid out with colours, brushes, a maulstick, an open album of drawings with a nude figure (possibly Fortuna), drawing materials, and a cast of the classical statue The Thorn-puller, or Spinario. Almost all the objects in this painting can be construed as symbols of art and science, and of the transience of life.

Attention was rightly drawn recently to the similarities between this painting and a vanitas engraving in which Hendrick Hondius depicted the attributes of the liberal and fine arts in a room, together with a skull adorned with a laurel wreath, and the inscriptions ‘Memento Mori’ and T’Éynde croont het werck (FINIS CORONAT OPUS), in other words, for anyone contemplating death, life’s ending is the crown on his work.⁴ Going by the print, it is not only the visual arts (painting, drawing and sculpture) that are represented in this picture, but also music, the art of warfare (armour and helmet) and science (the books).

It is unlikely that the painting is an allusion to the five senses, as has been suggested, with the musical instruments symbolizing Hearing, the drawing and painting implements Sight, the glass Taste, the oil lamp Smell and The Thorn-puller Touch.⁵ Claesz depicted the five senses in a large still life of musical instruments on a table of 1623, now in the Louvre,⁶ for which he was inspired by an engraving of 1612 by Dirck Matham.⁷

In the Rijksmuseum still life, the notion of vanitas expressed in the inscriptions on the print is depicted by the scene set in a corner of an artist’s studio. Almost all the objects could have been used as models for an artist. The classical statue of The Thorn-puller had been one of the most famous antique works of art on view in Rome since the Renaissance. Many artists made drawings of it, and it was also reproduced in numerous copies and casts. The Thorn-puller in the present painting is probably a plaster cast of the bronze, which is 73 cm high. Such casts and copies were also frequently used as drawing models in northern studios, and it seems to have been regarded as an ideal specimen of classical art for 16th and 17th-century artists.⁸

In Pieter Claesz’s Vanitas Still Life with Violin and Glass Ball of the same year in Nuremberg, the artist working at his easel is reflected in the glass ball (fig. a),⁹ and a painting from the same period in The Hague (fig. b) shows another painter working on a similar vanitas in his studio.¹⁰

What is not clear is the extent to which Pieter Claesz is making a statement about his craft in the present painting. It is certainly true that, practized artist that he was, he has captured the textures and reflections of the various objects with great precision. The smooth, detailed execution and the tonality place this among his earlier output, and there is no trace of the loose and broad monochrome manner of his later paintings.

Jan Piet Filedt Kok, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 44.