The skull, the dog, the lemon: hidden symbols in paintings
In old master painting, nothing is there by chance. Objects speak, and viewers of the time knew how to read them. A short glossary to rediscover this forgotten language.
For a seventeenth-century viewer, a painting was a text. A half-peeled lemon, a snuffed candle, a dog lying at a couple’s feet were not decorative details: they said something. Painters played with this language, patrons understood it, and viewers took a codebreaker’s pleasure in it.
We have lost this vocabulary. Yet it can be recovered with a few keys, and it turns a museum visit into a treasure hunt.
The vanitas
This is the genre most laden with symbols. A vanitas is a still life reminding us of the fragility of life and the futility of earthly pleasures. It almost always includes a skull, often accompanied by a burning or freshly snuffed candle, an hourglass, a watch, fading flowers, soap bubbles. Musical instruments, books, jewels and coins, for their part, recall the pleasures and knowledge that will not survive death.
Vanitas paintings enjoyed immense success in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, in a prosperous Protestant society that loved to surround itself with beautiful objects while reminding itself that they were worthless.
A short glossary
| Object | What it often means |
|---|---|
| Skull, candle, hourglass | The fragility of life |
| Dog | Fidelity |
| Half-peeled lemon | A fair appearance hiding bitterness |
| Lily | Purity, often associated with the Virgin |
| Mirror | Vanity, or self-knowledge |
| Soap bubble | The fleeting nature of all things |
| Ripe or half-eaten fruit | Pleasures, and their decline |
| Apple | Original sin |
These meanings are never absolute. A dog may also be a simple sign of wealth, a lemon a technical feat designed to show off the painter’s skill at rendering the skin of a fruit. Context decides.
A very famous dog
In Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, painted in 1434 and held at the National Gallery in London, a small dog stands at the couple’s feet. It is generally read as a symbol of fidelity. The painting is full of other clues: shoes cast off on the floor, a single lit candle in the chandelier, oranges on the windowsill and, above all, at the back, a convex mirror in which two figures can be seen entering the room. Above the mirror, the painter wrote in Latin: “Jan van Eyck was here.”
In the foreground of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, painted in 1533, floats a strange elongated shape. Seen from the front, it is illegible. But stand at the far right of the painting, very close to the wall, and it straightens up to reveal a skull. The technique is called anamorphosis. Amid the scientific instruments and symbols of power, death lay in wait.
Saints and their attributes
In religious painting, saints are recognised by an object that accompanies them, often linked to their martyrdom. Saint Peter holds keys, Saint Catherine a wheel, Saint Sebastian is pierced with arrows, Saint Jerome is accompanied by a lion. This code allowed the faithful, who often could not read, to identify the figure immediately.
How to practise
Next time you are in a room of Flemish or Dutch painting, look for the object that seems out of place. An empty oyster shell, an overturned glass, a clock. It is often the key to the painting. And it makes an excellent topic of conversation with whoever is with you.
Old paintings are not only looked at. They are read.
