The Putto with the Death's Head

The Symbolism of the Skull in Vanitas: Homo Bulla Est

“…The naked youth intensely gazes at the hourglass while resting on a large skull. He is meditating on the passing of time in a landscape surrounded with blooming and dead trees, scattered flowers, and insects-frogs and lizards (Janson, 1937;Seznec, 1938;Labno, 2016) The moral allusion of L'Hora Passa is associated with an ancient proverb about the brevity of life. For example, the ancient Roman poet and writer, Marcus Terentius Varro (116-26 BCE), in Rerum Rusticarum (On Agriculture), Book Three, recalled a popular proverb: "Ut dicitur si est homo bullas, eo magis senex" (As they say, man is a bubble, all the more so is an old man) (Stechow, 1938).…”

“…In Dutch representations of Homo bulla est, the visual imagery derived from two sources: One is literary, from the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466-1536), who reinvented Varro's saying, Homo bulla est, in his Adages (A collection of Greek and Latin proverbs) in 1500 (Baker, 2001) 9 . The other is a visual source long associated with images deriving from the Italian Renaissance, in particular, the medal of the Venetian Giovanni Boldù's Roman Emperor Caracalla, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Janson, 1937). The recto of the commemorative medal represents the bust head of the young emperor, while the verso refers to a historical memento mori with the Italian inscription IO SON FINE ("I am mortal" or "I am the end"), a motto similar to the L'Hora Passa about the certain fate of humankind, death.…”

“…Below Boldù's inscription, in a rocky landscape, there is a seated naked man, probably the artist, covering his head in his hands, lamenting. In front of him the angel of death, a young winged putto with a sad expression, rests on a skull, and holds onto flames or a "bundle of flames, symbol of the soul" (Janson, 1937). Other bones are discarded throughout the landscape.…”