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    Art Appreciation

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    Bleau Hinanay
    The painting depicts a young man holding a miniature portrait of himself as an older man. It uses symbolic objects like candles, flowers, skulls, and hourglasses to represent the brevity and instability of life. Vanitas paintings from the 16th-17th century were meant to remind viewers of death and the transient nature of worldly goods like wealth, health, and life itself. While the young man is how the artist looked years before, the miniature portrait shows what he looked like at the time of painting. The contrast highlights how life changes and decays over time in an inevitable process.

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    Art Appreciation

    Uploaded by

    Bleau Hinanay
    28 views2 pages
    The painting depicts a young man holding a miniature portrait of himself as an older man. It uses symbolic objects like candles, flowers, skulls, and hourglasses to represent the brevity and instability of life. Vanitas paintings from the 16th-17th century were meant to remind viewers of death and the transient nature of worldly goods like wealth, health, and life itself. While the young man is how the artist looked years before, the miniature portrait shows what he looked like at the time of painting. The contrast highlights how life changes and decays over time in an inevitable process.

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    ART APPRECIATION

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    The painting depicts a young man holding a miniature portrait of himself as an older man. It uses symbolic objects like candles, flowers, skulls, and hourglasses to represent the brevity and instability of life. Vanitas paintings from the 16th-17th century were meant to remind viewers of death and the transient nature of worldly goods like wealth, health, and life itself. While the young man is how the artist looked years before, the miniature portrait shows what he looked like at the time of painting. The contrast highlights how life changes and decays over time in an inevitable process.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    28 views2 pages

    Art Appreciation

    Uploaded by

    Bleau Hinanay
    The painting depicts a young man holding a miniature portrait of himself as an older man. It uses symbolic objects like candles, flowers, skulls, and hourglasses to represent the brevity and instability of life. Vanitas paintings from the 16th-17th century were meant to remind viewers of death and the transient nature of worldly goods like wealth, health, and life itself. While the young man is how the artist looked years before, the miniature portrait shows what he looked like at the time of painting. The contrast highlights how life changes and decays over time in an inevitable process.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    ART APPRECIATION

    A. Moral Message of a Painting


    1. WHAT is the moral message of the story behind this painting? (10 points)
    Vanitas is an explicit genre of art in which the artist uses gloomy and moody symbolic
    objects in order that the viewer becomes very aware of the brevity of life and the
    inevibility of death.   The origins of the term vanitas can be traced back to the Latin
    biblical adage from the Book of Ecclesiastes (1:2): As much space is given to the
    objects as the subject of the painting, which is, ostensibly, the young man sitting beside
    the table. The interesting thing to note is that the young man (the painter himself) is not
    the only person in this ‘self-portrait’; he is holding a miniature painting in his hand with
    the depiction of a much older person in it. So, can this really be called a self-portrait? It
    would be implausible to consider that the objects in the painting exist in isolation.
    These symbols of ‘vanitas’ have been selected to illustrate a uniform theme of the “swift
    passage of time and the terrible instability of life” (Duffy, 2012) in the painting. A style of
    painting popular in the 16th and 17th century, vanitas paintings were also known by
    another name of ‘memento mori' (remember death). All the symbols in the painting are
    objects in a transient state of life, all of them together acting as a metaphor for life itself
    which is always in a state of motion bound towards a certain end.
    Lighted up candles eventually lose their flame; flowers wilt, soap bubbles can be broken
    even by a speck of dust. The skull, the pearls, and coins represent the changing nature
    of life and wealth and prestige respectively. These can be lost due to a number of
    circumstances and within the blink of an eye. Nothing is permanent, especially the
    movement of time which is aptly embodied here by the hourglass.             This idea
    about the temporary state of bringing us back to the subject of the painting.
    The young man is the artist himself but a cursory check lets the viewer know that that
    this, not the artist as he was at the time the painting was made. Bailly painted the
    portrait when he was 67 years old, indicating that while the young man is how the artist
    used to be some years prior, the ‘real’ portrait is the miniature the man is holding
    (Kosara, 2007). That painting within the painting shows Bailly in the state he was at the
    time. The contrast between young and old is striking and this contrast not only
    magnifies the theme intended for the painting but adds another layer of meaning and
    possible interpretation to the whole setting.
                The young man looks contemplative; possibly, the painting in his hand was made
    to portray his own vision about his future self. His older self is decaying, without the
    energy and drive of youth and this natural, inevitable process of change is not
    something that any man looks forward to with pleasure. Surrounded by symbols of
    vanitas, his imagination would be further encouraged to think in terms of the transiency
    of life and all things associated with it.
    the self-portrait composition of a collage is very personal and being such, the author
    made the process of making it very personal by allowing his self as much as creative
    license by being spontaneous in creating the collage.... the self-portrait composition of
    a collage is very personal and being such, I made the process of making it very personal
    by allowing myself as much as creative license by being spontaneous in creating the
    collage.... I would like to enjoy the process by expressing myself in creating myself
    through the self-portrait.

    B. The Artist’s Choice of Subject

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