# Vanitas \(Allegory of Transience\) [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [RÉGNIER, Nicolas]() - Date: 1601-1650 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 130 x 105 cm ## Commentary Vanitas \(Allegory of Transience\) c. 1626 Oil on canvas, 130 x 105 cm Christian Museum, Esztergom A vanitas is a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, often contrasting symbols of wealth and symbols of ephemerality and death. Vanitas pictures flourished in the seventeenth century when variants can be found in Protestant Holland and Catholic Flemish, Italian and Spanish territories. The present painting was registered in the nineteenth century as a work by Guido Reni, later it was thought to be by a follower of Caravaggio such as Artimisia Gentileschi or Johann Liss. Now it is catalogued as a painting by the Franco-Flemish Nicolas Regnier active in Rome and Venice. ## Related artworks - [A Musician Playing a Lute to a Singing Girl]() - [Cardsharps and Fortune Teller \(detail\)]() - [Cardsharps and Fortune Teller]() - [Guessing Game]() - [Self-Portrait with a Portrait on an Easel \(detail\)]() - [Self-Portrait with a Portrait on an Easel]() - [St John the Baptist]() - [St Sebastian]() - [St Sebastian Tended by Irene and Her Servant]() - [The Death of Sophonisba]() - [The Fortune Teller]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()