Yet pronk works carried deeper meanings as the earliest forms of vanitas, a genre that uses symbolism to convey the brevity of life and futility of pleasure.

Vanitas, a Renaissance artistic genre meant to show pleasure’s transient futility in the face of death’s inevitability, was modernized and performed for visitors.

But Met curator Ian Alteveer has filtered his selection through another of Brown’s long-standing preoccupations: the “intertwined themes of mirroring, still life, memento mori, and vanitas.”

As a conceptual painter interested in the Vanitas and Memento Mori styles of painting, he was drawn to the subject’s aesthetic simplicity and the complicated, fraught history.

Most of the work falls into what might be called the “vanitas” mode of contemporary art, modern analogues to Renaissance paintings reminding viewers that death and judgment are inevitable and supersede pleasure and worldly pursuits.