Conférence : « “Vanity of vanities, […] all is vanity”. Breath, Time, and Standstill in the Baroque Vanitas Still Life ».

Conférence en anglais proposée par Karin Leonhard, Professeur d’histoire de l’art, Universität Konstanz.

What exactly characterizes vanitas-still lives and in what way do they differ from other forms of the genre of still life? A commonplace would be to consider them primarily as the programmatic expression of the volatile nature of earthly vanity, completing the representation of inanimate objects with symbols of fugacity (e.g. hourglass or clock, skull, extinct candle, etc.). The conference aims at critically questioning this kind of interpretation and proposes a new reading of this artistic genre.