The work represents a 17th century gentleman dressed in the clothing of the time and asleep while an angel shows him the ephemeral nature of pleasures, riches, honors and glory. The angel shows him the hieroglyph of the date on the sun, which hurts, flies quickly and kills. The set of objects placed on the table constitutes an authentic still life in which a condensation of symbols and allegories is established. The symbols on the table are very complex, but some stand out for their continuous presence in all the "vanitas": the skull that symbolizes death, the theater mask about hypocrisy, the jewels and money that are the riches that we cannot take to the other world, the deck of cards and weapons such as gambling and the pleasures of hunting, the clock that indicates the inexorable passage of time, the unlit candle that indicates the extinction of life. . The objects and multiple meanings are innumerable. Links that we can select from all of them. The painter has represented a "corpus" of the objects of the vanity of the world and its meaninglessness treated with a masterful definition that individualizes them as a way of accentuating, through the real, the presence of their didactic, allegorical and moral character. Object Type: painting. Genre: religious art. Date: circa 1650. Dimensions: height: 152 cm (59.8 in); width: 217 cm (85.4 in). Medium: oil on canvas. Collection: Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Pereda
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