Vanitas

Joseph Heintz the Younger was born in Augsburg around 1600, the son of a painter who had served the emperor Rudolf II in Prague. The son went south instead. By 1625 he was working in Italy, and he settled in Venice and stayed until he died there in 1678, more than 50 years in one city. What he sold there were oddities. Venetians bought his temptations of Saint Anthony, his crowds of monsters, scenes worked up out of the northern prints after Bosch and Bruegel that circulated in every workshop. This picture belongs to that trade, and Italian writers have never agreed on one name for it, calling it the Vanitas or else the Triumph of Cupid. No date for it has ever been published, and no measurements either.