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Motif · motif_book

Book

A book, drawn open or closed. Vanitas object per Tate. SHIPPED WITH ONE EDGE and low confidence for the same reason as the musical instrument: no fetched tattoo-domain source names a book as a drawn tattoo element, so the transfer from still-life painting to skin is unevidenced and is not asserted here.
Thin
Low confidenceresearched

1 attested · 1 promoted1 source · T1

What the research says

motifs_seed
Category
object
Variants
open book; closed book; stack of books
Common themes
vanitas

Provenance

1 resolved

  • Vanitas (opens in a new tab)

    Tier 1

    Tate

    Tate art-term page. Defines vanitas as a still life including symbolic objects designed to remind the viewer of their mortality and of the "worthlessness of worldly goods and pleasures", and states vanitas works are "closely related to memento mori" still lifes. IMPORTANT LIMIT: art-historical only; no tattoo content.

    museum · retrieved 2026-08-28

Related concepts

2 links

Associated with · 1

  • → outgoingVanitasSubthemeThin
    strength 0.75promoted · not an independent attestationresearched

    Promoted from motifs_seed.common_themes of motif_book ('vanitas'); themes_seed.common_motifs of theme_vanitas ('book'). Asserted independently from both ends of the relation; deduped to one edge. Confidence is the LOWER of the contributing rows, not the higher. No new fact: this edge restates a value already present in the corpus. STRENGTH 0.75 set by the T11.11c rule: this pairing is asserted by TWO parent rows, one from each endpoint's own association column; the pack's scale reads 0.75 as 'frequent'. Inputs are corpus counts only - no source count, tier or confidence is used.

Can symbolize · 1

  • → outgoingVanity of Worldly GoodsSymbolThin
    strength 0.50researched

    Tier 1, Tate, third member of the same list: “musical instruments, wine and books to remind us explicitly of the vanity (in the sense of worthlessness) of worldly pleasures and goods”. ART-HISTORICAL ONLY.