Practice question · True or false
The vanitas belongs to the genre the academic hierarchy ranked last.
Hints
- Recall Félibien's ranking from the first lesson of this unit.
- Still life was ranked fifth of five.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and the mismatch is instructive. Still life was ranked last for depicting nothing that acts, and the vanitas uses it to address mortality, judgement and the futility of achievement, the largest subjects available, which is a reasonably direct argument against the hierarchy from inside it.
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
- A vanitas is an expensive, highly skilled painting bought by prosperous people and hung in their houses. Why…
- 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.
- Memento mori art functions as an admonition rather than an expression of despair. What follows from this…