The iconography of time is an immensely rich and varied subject, but it becomes richer still when considered in the context of painting - both as an object and as an act - and its relation to the passage of time. read moreIn Holbein's portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, known as the Ambassadors, many elements familiar from later vanitas imagery are present. The famously distorted skull stretched out between the sitters is an explicit (if hidden) reminder of death. The higher of the two shelves between them is laden with instruments - such as sundials and quadrants - nearly all of which were used to tell the time. There have been many interpretations of the painting and the objects within it, but clearly one intended emphasis was on the brevity of life and the futility of worldly wealth and accomplishments. But while the painting may carry such a message, it also contradicts it. Jean de Dinteville, on the left, may well have been accustomed to meditate upon his own mortality (he wears a skull badge on his cap to reinforce the point), but he also had himself painted with an eye to posterity. Every portrait is commemorative. For Durer, writing a generation earlier, portraiture performed one of the principal roles of art, which was to 'preserve the likenesses of men after their deaths'. In this sense, at least, painting could cheat time. In common with many portraits, the ages of Holbein's sitters are carefully noted ('29' on de Dinteville's dagger and '25' on the book under de Selve's elbow). This, the painting claims, is how its sitters appeared at this particular time. Holbein included the date, 1533, beneath the signature and it has been claimed that the shadows cast on the polyhedral sundial to the left of de Selve's elbow record the hour. Common sense might reject such a notion (there is no direct sunlight and the sundial's design is problematic as it appears to have been adapted to tell the time in North African latitudes), but there are portraits dated to the day and, on rare occasions, to the hour. Any claims to such exactitude, raises more questions: The Ambassadors is a painting that self-evidently took time to paint. It may mark the visit in the summer of 1533 of Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur, to his friend de Dinteville, then resident in London, but we can be confident that the picture was unfinished when the churchman left the country. It is, of course, the extravagant detail that encourages us to search for meaning in its every brushstroke. It is even tempting (granted the absence of any sun) to see the shadows of the sundial as reflecting the passage of time during the painting's making, for although one of the faces clearly shows the time as 9.30, on the two others an hour has elapsed and it is 10.30.
An extract from 'Telling Time' by Alexander Sturgis. hide this.

Harmen Steenwyck’s Still Life is clearly a painting about time. A chronometer sits open on the table measuring out time’s passage and beside it is a skull as a symbol of time’s end. read more It is a picture intended to remind us of life’s brevity – no more substantial than the thin trail of smoke from the snuffed-out lamp. But it is also supposed to prepare us for eternity: reminding us of the lasting truths of religion by measuring them against the fleeting pleasures of earthly wealth, learning and the senses – symbolised by the precious objects, books and musical instruments.
An extract from 'Telling Time' by Alexander Sturgis. hide this.

The Corpus Clock positioned outside the new Taylor Library facing King’s Parade in Cambridge, England, was conceived as a work of public art.

Much of sculptor Andy Goldsworthy’s work is informed by or evokes the passage of time and may be deliberately ephemeral, constructed to melt, drift or blow away with sun, current or wind. See a Rivers and Tides extract here and his book TIME