Answer:
The correct answer is d. It’s an example of a vanitas piece
Explanation:
Frans Hals, the Elder, (c. 1582-1666) is considered one of the masters of the Dutch Golden Age. He has played an important role to develop the popularity of portraits in that era. Other important names of that Age are Vermeer and Rembrandt.
He’s styled as Dutch Baroque, whose techniques are connected to a theatrical light usage and facial expressions of characters, and the approach to non-religious themes in his paintings.
Differenty from other painters of that time, he has developed a painting technique where the brushstroke was visible, which many critics at the beginning considered it as flaw painting. But it was a revolutionary act, as in classical paintings, the brushstroke was imperceptible. This would return with other movements, like romanticism, and later with the impressionists.
As the Netherlands has adopted reformists churches as their official religion, the iconoclast belief was present in their art production. Thus, members of the prominent bourgeoise have been depicted, and many of them were patrons of dutch painters.
But Hals, in a very similar attempt to Caravaggio, also painted ordinary people without the academic idealization. Usually, his paintings’ titles weren’t on behalf of nobody and held it in description way, just like the painting we’re approaching.
Young Man with a Skull (1626-8) depicts a man holding a skull with his left hand, wearing upper-class garments, with very expressive face and hands. It looks just a stage or a rehearsal scene, which made many believe it was an homage to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But the artist intentional act was to discuss Vanitas, which is one of the churches’ dogmas. Vanitas means vanity in Latin and is related to the mundane superb and the consequences of the life brevity. The opposition to it is Charitas, which means charity, or to donate your life to others.
Hal’s pictures, just Rembrandt’s, had a social criticism behind those images. An approach that would be restored by the XIX century Realists.
