Practice question · Multiple choice
A vanitas is an expensive, highly skilled painting bought by prosperous people and hung in their houses. Why is that not a contradiction?
Hints
- Ask who a warning about the vanity of possessions is addressed to.
- It is aimed at people with possessions.
Show the answer
A. The warning has force in proportion to what the owner has to lose
Why
Because the warning is aimed at exactly those people. A reminder that learning, wealth and beauty do not help is directed at those who have them, and an expensive object making that claim in a prosperous house is the genre working rather than failing.
Practise Death, Transcendence and the Human Condition
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Death, Transcendence and the Human Condition
- The danse macabre orders its figures by social rank in order to dissolve the ranking.
- Sort each object by what it signifies in a vanitas.
- Which are true of the Last Judgement as a subject?
- Complete the account of the imagery of death.
- In roughly which decade did the danse macabre mural at the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris appear?
- Match each theme to what the imagery is doing.
- Arrange these developments in the imagery of death in order.
- The vanitas belongs to the genre the academic hierarchy ranked last.
- Memento mori art functions as an admonition rather than an expression of despair. What follows from this…