Vanitas

Etymology

From Latin "vanitas" (emptiness, futility), from "vanus" (empty), famous from the Vulgate’s opening of Ecclesiastes, “vanitas vanitatum” (vanity of vanities). Seventeenth-century painters, chiefly in the Netherlands, took the theme as the organizing idea of a still-life form.

noun · /VAN-i-tahs/
A genre of still-life painting, especially Dutch Golden Age, that uses symbolic objects to remind the viewer of mortality and the emptiness of worldly pleasures.
What it names
A whole symbolic tradition in art — the meditation on death staged as an arrangement of objects — as a recognized genre.
Example
The vanitas hung in the study: a skull beside a snuffed candle, wilting tulips, and a watch mid-tick.
Related idea
Built around the memento mori, the reminder of death, but broader than that single motif: a memento mori can be one skull in any image, while vanitas is the entire still-life genre that assembles such symbols — hourglasses, decaying fruit, extinguished flames — into a sustained argument about impermanence.