Vanitas, vanitatum...

Stedeljk Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden

Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols, David Bailly, 1651

Unlike my playful little flower photographs, this is the real deal ~ a true seventeenth century, Dutch Vanitas still life by an acknowledged master of the genre & one of my personal favorites. All the traditional symbols are there: the just extinguished candle with it's wisp of smoke, the ephemeral soap bubbles, a tall flute of wine to drink & a pipe to smoke (earthly pleasures), coin & pearls (fortune), the hourglass (I believe there is a pocket watch as well), the fading flowers, a glimpse of an alto recorder on the left, tools of the artist's trade, all there (along with some plague references) but most importantly, there is the skull ~ once the home of perception, knowledge & reason, now an empty, hollow chamber. 

At first glance it's the usual subjects but a closer look reveals there's something a bit different happening here & that's why I find this particular Vanitas painting so compelling. One might assume that the self-portrait was the handsome, auburn-haired youth on the left with his sensual mouth, a self-confident & slightly haughty look in his eye ~ painting stick in hand, ready to dazzle us with his attention to detail & technical virtuosity... Well, yes & no. We are playing a game with time here for this is actually a double self-portrait that creates a temporal paradox. Bailly's true likeness, the way he appeared at the time of the painting's execution, is actually the older gentleman, sporting a Van Dyke goatee, whose portrait is held by the young, remembered Bailly of the past with the downy beginnings of a moustache on his upper lip. In a move apparently unusual for the time, the artist has managed to blur the line between still life & portraiture (not to mention past & present) by literally transforming himself into a vanitas symbol. This is what I once was; this is what I am now... Tempus fugit indeed. 

I've also just noticed that there is possibly a subtle bit of trompe l'oeil in the mature portrait. (It's hard to tell in the reproduction & I might be imagining this.) The elder Bailly had encircled himself in a cameo-like, oval opening ~ for centuries a common framing device for portraits ~ nothing unusual about that, but if you look very closely his arm seems to break, ever so slightly, the picture plane at the bottom; as if it were draped over a window ledge, giving an added dimensionality & "realness" to the true self-portrait. If this is the case, then the formal device of an oval frame has been transformed into a port-hole window from which a grey-haired, perhaps world-weary David Bailly gazes out at us with sad eyes.

Here, then gone.