Dancers Backstage (detail) 1883

This is a detail of “Dancers Backstage,” painted by Edgar Degas, a man captivated by the spectacle of the ballet. Here, the dancers are adorned with flowers, which carry with them the fragrance of fleeting beauty, youth, and the ephemeral nature of performance. This echoes the vanitas tradition found in Dutch Golden Age paintings, where flowers symbolized the transience of life. But in Degas' work, the symbol shifts. It becomes entwined with the dancers' own transient moments of glory on stage. Consider how the image of a young woman has been depicted throughout art history. The motif is ancient, reaching back to antiquity and reappearing in Renaissance paintings. The flowers could be interpreted as both an adornment and an emblem of vulnerability, an awareness perhaps embedded in the collective psyche. This imbues the painting with a quiet, underlying tension. Ultimately, Degas seems to remind us that beauty, like the brief life of a flower, is both exquisite and heartbreakingly impermanent.