The Emblem Shelf
The Vanitas
A picture built to make you feel the time you spend looking.
- Work
- from a vanitas emblem
- Maker
- Engraver unknown
- Date
- c. 1650
- Source
- Vanitas emblem, 17th c. · scan: Wikimedia Commons
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source plate — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
A skull set among a guttering candle, a book, and a few scattered flowers — the vanitas, the still-life sermon of the seventeenth century, its every object a reminder that learning, beauty, and life itself run out. The word comes from Ecclesiastes: vanitas vanitatum, 'vanity of vanities, all is vanity.' Printed and painted across the Dutch and Flemish seventeenth century, the vanitas made an art of the memento mori, arranging the emblems of mortality into something almost sumptuous. Here is the type in an engraved plate: the skull at the centre, the candle nearly spent. A picture built, with great care, to make you feel the passing of the time you spend looking at it.
See it on your wall
The plate, in your home
The Vanitas printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate — from a vanitas emblem (1650), held by Vanitas emblem, 17th c. · scan: Wikimedia Commons. The work was published before 1931 and is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on 200gsm EMA matte art paper; framed pieces sit behind acrylic, no mat.
- Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
- Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
- If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.
Why our plates cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans available, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the emblem line, the letterpress bite, the registration of colour — on stock made to outlive its owner.
