Vanity
Vanity is sometimes used in a positive sense to refer to a rational concern for one's appearance, attractiveness, and dress, separate from pride as an emotion. It may also refer to an excessive or irrational belief in or concern with one's abilities or attractiveness in the eyes of others.
The term vanity originates from the Latin word vanitas, meaning emptiness, untruthfulness, futility, foolishness, and empty pride. Here, empty pride means a fake pride, in the sense of vainglory, unjustified by one's own achievements and actions but sought by pretense and appeals to superficial characteristics.
In many religions, vanity is considered a form of self-idolatry, in which one rejects the divine for the sake of one's own image, and thereby becomes divorced from the graces of their god. The stories of Lucifer and Narcissus (origin of the term narcissism), among others, attend to a pernicious aspect of vanity.
In Western art, vanity was often symbolized by a peacock, Biblical terms, and by the Whore of Babylon. During the Renaissance, it was typically represented as a naked woman, sometimes seated or reclining on a couch. She attends to her hair with a comb and a mirror. The mirror is sometimes held by a demon or a putto. Other symbols include jewels, gold coins, a purse, and the figure of Death.
Often depicted is an inscription on a scroll that reads Omnia Vanitas ("All is Vanity"), a quote from the Latin translation of the Book of Ecclesiastes. Although that phrase—itself depicted in a type of still life called vanitas—originally referred not to an obsession with one's appearance but to the ultimate fruitlessness of man's efforts in this world, the phrase summarizes the complete preoccupation of the subject of the picture. "The artist invites us to pay lip-service to condemning her", Edwin Mullins writes, "while offering us full permission to drool over her. She admires herself in the glass, while we treat the picture that purports to incriminate her as another kind of glass—a window—through which we peer and secretly desire her." The theme of the recumbent woman often merged artistically with the non-allegorical one of a reclining Venus.
Examples of vanity in art include:
In his table of the seven deadly sins, Hieronymus Bosch depicts a bourgeois woman admiring herself in a mirror held up by a devil. Behind her is an open jewelry box.
A painting attributed to Nicolas Tournier, which hangs in the Ashmolean Museum, is An Allegory of Justice and Vanity. A young woman holds a balance, symbolizing justice; she does not look at the mirror or the skull on the table before her.
Vermeer's famous painting Girl with a Pearl Earring is sometimes believed to depict the sin of vanity, as the young girl has adorned herself before a glass without further positive allegorical attributes.
All is Vanity, by Charles Allan Gilbert (1873–1929), carries on this theme. An optical illusion, the painting depicts what appears to be a large grinning skull. Upon closer examination, it reveals itself to be a young woman gazing at her reflection in the mirror of her vanity table.
