Imagine commissioning a costly masterpiece for your grandest dining room, only for its message to be that everything you own is pointless and you are going to die. This episode explores Vanitas, the morbid and surprisingly enduring art genre born among painters in the Dutch city of Leiden and booming commercially between 1585 and 1730. We start with the Latin meaning of the word, its roots in Ecclesiastes, and the related practice of memento mori.

From there we examine why guilt-ridden Calvinist merchants of the Dutch Golden Age hung skulls beside their wealth, how Spanish painters like Antonio de Pereda expanded the theme from personal morality to the decay of empires, and how the concept leapt into music through Giacomo Carissimi and Robert Schumann. The story runs all the way to extreme metal, Kingdom Hearts, The Case Study of Vanitas, t ...