THE LATIN 'VANITAS’ HAS multiple meanings. Its primary definition is the same as the English word 'vanity': vainglory, untruth, self-deception. A secondary definition is "nothingness". Yet a third definition of the word refers to a type of still-life painting characteristic of the 17th century Dutch school, a form of art that is symbolic of mortality. 'Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas' – Ecclesiastes, 1:2 – translates as ‘vanity of vanities; all is vanity’. This phrase can serve to instruct on how to best view such an image.  

At first, works characterized as ‘vanitas’ proclaim death, however their meaning is far more nuanced. Their intent: to serve as vessels of meditation upon how we, the living, may reconcile life and death during our lifetimes. To modern eyes, these works may appear strange, even disturbing, with their seemingly random depictions of skulls, dying flowers and worldly riches, yet not a single object is without meaning. Each item symbolizes the transience of worldly pleasures — the fragility and ephemerality of life. In the context of a ‘vanitas’ artwork, contemplating the daily presence of death is meant to be employed in the pursuit of spiritual growth; an incentive to live a life more worthy.

A ‘vanitas’ work of art further denotes the futility, aimlessness and emptiness of being obsessed with material objects; material objects will eventually fade. To be fixated upon worldly possessions, unnecessary adornment and excessive wealth, then, is to be fixated upon that emptiness. It has been said, “you can’t take it with you”, but what can one take from this earthly realm? One’s soul, if such a thing exists.

The photographic series, Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, is an artwork clearly following the tradition of the 17th century Dutch ‘vanitas’. The series is devoted to portraits of mummified human remains, housed in the Capuchin Catacombs at the Church of Santa Maria della Pace in Palermo, Sicily. 

There, in a place held holy as a direct portal to the divine, the religious, aristocratic, and affluent classes from the 16th through the early 20th centuries chose to display their mummified dead, upright, as if standing, exposed to view and fully clothed, in an effort to bring them closer to eternal salvation. The Vanitas portraits comprise an intertwined narrative of beauty and mortality, and ask both anthropological and philosophical questions about life, death, and the ability of art to connect with the beyond.

In the Vanitas series, the choice of dominant blue tones signifies that hue’s devotional relevance to traditional Catholic dogma and display. As such, the color carries with it a quality that conjures both the melancholy and the transcendent.

These works are an examination of visually-heated subject matter, yet also nod to art-historical influences in the works of prominent painters and photographers, a handful of whom have created artworks that specifically depict the Capuchin crypt, among them Otto Dix, Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, and Sigmar Polke. Other more formal touchstones for the Vanitas images include the works of El Greco, James Ensor, Egon Schiele, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.

The curious catacombs of the Capuchin monks in Palermo remain disturbing evidence of humanity’s romantic visions of immortality. Upright, as if already risen, some attired in decaying vestiges of worldly wealth, believing themselves first in line for resurrection on the Day of Judgment, the Frati Cappuccini, religious leaders, aristocrats, and persons of means line this underground necropolis. Today, left to neglect, reduced to shreds of their former glory, these mummies remain both twisted and eternally poised, as mannered as Schiele’s watercolors of tortured flesh.

The Vanitas portraits attempt to portray humanity’s stubborn insistence to touch the eternal and thereby achieve immortality, wrought here literally as portraits of decaying bone, silk and cotton clinging to existence even with the spirit long departed.