Bruyn the Elder's Vanitas still life has many layers of meaning connected to the books of Moses, their Latin translations, and a terrible and long-standing beef between Protestants and Catholics, based on differences in their interpretations of the scripture.

At times, the rivalry has gotten even worse than A&E's Shipping Wars. One of the many accusations leveled by Martin Luther at the kickoff of the Reformation, just a few years prior to Vanitas, is that the Catholic Church was violating the commandment or mitzvah, passed along by Moses to the Israelites in the Book of Deuteronomy, not to "make for yourself a graven image," as the passage is generally rendered in English. The word for "graven image," pesel, refers specifically to a carved image of an idol for worship, the practice of which was so common in those days that the text almost neglects to actually define it, assuming that every reader will know exactly what idol worship looks like. Of course, the translator of Deuteronomy meant "graven" in the sense of "engraved," not burial, but Vanitas relates to the controversy over the passage. The Latin inscription on the parchment portrayed in Vanitas Still-Life reads, omnia morte cadunt, mors ultima linia rerum, "everything passes with death, the ultimate limit of all things." Like another, much more extreme memento mori, the ornately skull-decorated crypt under the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome, this Vanitas still life tells you that individual human exertion is only worthwhile in the pursuit of service to the Almighty, in the form of clerical authority. 

Bruyn produced this work in the first decade of his successful practice in Köln (or Cologne), Germany. The vanitas image, named for the words in Ecclesiastes 1:2 ("all is vanity" or hevel, mere breath, or"everything is meaningless" in a newer translation), often features the snuffed-out candle, as in this work, symbolizing the tragedies of martyrdom and its profane parallel, life claimed too soon by apparently mundane causes. 

The clerical sponsorship of Bruyn's work, and that of many other Catholic artists, was both the origin of European medieval art and a major vulnerability, from the perspective of those who sought to defend the Church from the unceasing attacks of the Protestants. Using Deuteronomy, the followers of Luther accused the Church of making "graven images," repeating the comments Jews and Muslims had been making for centuries and adapting them to Christians disillusioned by the financial practices of the Popes, especially the Medicis, particularly with regard to the selling of indulgences. For his Protestant critics, Bruyn's Vanitas still life is no different from his many portraits of esteemed citizens who would have paid the equivalent of $10,000-100,000 in today's money for a picture of themselves. If a charitable curator did a retrospective of the critically neglected Bruyn, it might be a good idea not to hang this bleak memento mori next to those portraits. One upshot of the persistent growth of Protestantism in Germany is a lot more pictures like these, whose scriptural content is indirect or non-human, in an attempt to adhere more strictly to the translated words of Moses.