Comment on a painting.
Author: Juan de Valdés Leal (4 May 1622 – 15 October 1690).
Known for painting, sculpture,etching and architecture.Period or era: Spanish Baroque.
Title: In ictu oculi.
Created: between 1670 and 1672.
I’m not interested to comment about the objects that compound the picture, neither about the colours and others aspects. For example I don’t want to talk about the colours because the colours used between 1670 and 1672 are not the same that you buy today in a fine arts shop. I save to talk about the objects that compound the scenery because I don’t want to figure any hide message. This painting is inside of the genre named Vanitas, it try to transmit; the fragility and brevity of the life, the futility of worldly pleasures and the certainty of death. Poor and rich; they are equal all die and all things stay in the earth. It has connection with Ecclesiastes 1:2 “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”
I’m very interested on the inscription “in ictv ocvli ”, is a Latin expression meaning in the twinkling of an eye, this expresión you can find in the Holy Bible in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 verse 52; “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.”. It is a reference that you may live after death if you believe in God…
The painter did an allegory between death and life, playing with a genre very practiced in baroque.
