Crâne et chandelier

Crâne et chandelier (Skull and Candlestick, c.1900) at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart is among Cézanne's most explicitly symbolic still lifes, combining the skull of vanitas tradition with the candlestick that had represented the light of life since the earliest Christian iconography. His other skull paintings — whether single skulls or the late Three Skulls on an Oriental Carpet — tended to minimize the symbolic dimension by isolating the skull as a formal object. The addition of the candlestick here creates a pairing that even the most formalist reading cannot entirely neutralize: the candle's light, temporary and combustible, placed beside the skull's permanent, light-free bone. Cézanne was sixty years old around this date, working with the awareness of physical decline that his diabetic condition and the long Provençal winters were imposing. The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart's collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century work places this canvas alongside German Expressionist paintings that would be directly influenced by the generation of younger artists who learned from Cézanne's example.

The candlestick's vertical form provides a strong compositional anchor beside the rounded mass of the skull, the two objects creating a dialogue between linear and volumetric form. Cézanne renders the skull's smooth surface with careful attention to the way light models its convex form, using cool and warm tones to establish the different planes.