‘Vanity (Vanitas)’ is a debossed letterpress print on reflecting paper. Edition of 25, A3 (297x420mm) prints. Signed & numbered on the back.

Notes on ‘Vanity (Vanitas)’
1. “In another version of Tintoretto, Susannah is looking at herself in the mirror. Thus she joins the spectator of herself. This mirror is oftes used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical […] You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting vanity, thus morally condeming the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.” John Berger, Ways of Seeing.

2. “Most conspicuously, the symbol of the mirror became closely connected with women and the sins of Lust and Vanity. In a “vanitas” painting — expressing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death — a woman is usually shown looking into a mirror.” Christopher P Jones, Decoding Reflections: The Meaning of Mirrors in Art.

3. “NARCISSUS”, Ines Cox @ines_cox