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vanitas
Vanitas is vanity, or a piece of art that reminds people of mortality and that material things are temporary.
(noun)An example of vanitas is a painting of skulls and rotting food.
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See vanitas in Webster's New World College Dictionary
noun
- vanity; futility
- a work of art containing symbols of mortality or the impermanence of material things; esp., a 17th-cent. Dutch painting of this kind
Origin: L
adjective
of or relating to this genre: the vanitas tradition
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