Vanitas Still-Life

This skull is the back of a portrait. Bruyn painted it in 1524 on the reverse of his likeness of Margaretha von Mochau, and it is one of the earliest independent still lifes in European painting, made when a picture of mere objects, with no saint and no story, was almost unthinkable. On a ledge the skull rests beside a guttering candle, its smoke still rising, and a slip of parchment carries a line of Latin: omnia morte cadunt, mors ultima linia rerum. Everything falls with death, death the final boundary of all things. The words come from the Roman poet Horace. Whoever opened this panel met the living face first and, on turning it, this, a reminder built into the object itself that the woman portrayed would not last. The candle has just been snuffed.