This is one of my all-time favorite Baroque works, but there's, like, no scholarly works on it, so here's an excerpt from an essay I wrote on its meaning, entitled "Shadow and Light: Tenebrism and Chiaroscuro in Depictions of Femininity in Baroque Art":
"While candles in Baroque art tend to serve a similar purpose regardless of context– a literal and symbolic way to expose some otherwise obscured truth– this is used to wildly different effect throughout varying traditions. For example, the candle became a universally-recognized element of vanitas and memento mori paintings– related genres which utilized carefully-curated still lifes as a way to create physical manifestations of the inevitability of death. Items such as books, candles or lamps, skulls, and timepieces became synonymous with these late Renaissance and Baroque-era genres. Skulls, once again, serve as a constant reminder of death and the limitations of the human body, books as a symbol of the limited use of accruing earthly knowledge, and timepieces as a very tangible representation of the unstoppable, unforgiving nature of existence. While the vast, almost complete, majority of paintings within these genres are still lifes, a handful include human or humanlike (e.g. angelic) figures. One such example is the enigmatic Allegory of the Vanity of Earthly Things by an unknown French artist. This painting, while clearly referencing vanitas and memento mori paintings through the familiar naming convention (i.e. “Allegory of …”) and the direct reference to vanity in the title, as well as the selection of objects, evades direct categorization. The female figure is unnamed and unrecognized. Because of the relation of Mary Magdalene to vanitas paintings, one could make the argument that the figure is meant to be a representation of Mary. However, depictions of Mary Magdalene throughout history nearly universally depict her with long, flowing, curly, often blonde or reddish hair (with Artemisia Gentileschi’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy being a perfect example). Additionally, when Mary Magdalene is depicted as the subject of vanitas paintings, she is generally the one contemplating the macabre items. In this painting, the woman seems to be wordlessly communicating with an individual to the audience’s left. As she tilts the mirror– a symbol of truth, obsession with the self, and most importantly, prediction– towards this phantom audience member and points to the skull with a faint, knowing smirk, she seems to be very intentionally and explicitly indicating the point of the work– death is inevitable. If the predictive, mystical capabilities of mirrors– as well as the truth-revealing properties of the candle– are considered, one could even interpret the woman as a harbinger of death."
