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, the Harvard Lampoon motto, and contemporary artists who use raw meat, x-rays, underwater photography and melting glaciers to shock us back into awareness of mortality.

• Why vanitas means futility, not narcissism, and the sandcastle analogy that separates the two
• The lute, the books, the gold coins and the skull: reading the standard still-life formula, including a 1524 work by Barthel Bruyn the Elder
• Schumann’s Vanitas vanitatum with humor and the parallel with modern meme culture
• Jana Sterbak’s 1987 flesh dress and Alexandre de Cadenet’s x-ray skull portraits
• The One Planet, One Future project and vanitas as an environmental warning