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Julia Stankova began her painting career in Sofia, Bulgaria, restoring icons. Inspired by the symbolic meaning of the images, she began painting her own works. Her personal engagement with her paintings was formed, she says, when she started reading the New Testament. “I took my place in the queue behind the apostles waiting for Christ to wash my feet too.” In Transfiguration, Stankova brings her own devotion, imagination, and theology to the iconic tradition.

The vanitas tradition in 17th-century Dutch still-life painting draws inspiration from the Vulgate version of Ecclesiastes 1:2: “Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas” [“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”]. The Latin vanitas means “emptiness” or “futility” and was used to render the Hebrew term hebel, which primarily means “vapor” and refers to that which is fleeting and perishable (Ps. 62:9, 144:4). In this painting, Pieter Claesz, a German-born painter based in Haarlem, depicts human mortality with a skull and bone.