Still-life paintings of musical instruments, which flourished in early-modern Northern Europe, were typically associated with the theme of vanitas (Eccl. 1:2, 12:8): time, leading inexorably to death, urges us not to live at the mercy of the senses. Musical instruments embody this symbology: what could be more ephemeral than the sound that vanishes away as soon as it has been produced? Evaristo Baschenis was the first painter to make musical instruments the overall protagonists of still-life paintings. His experience as priest and musician evidently influenced his paintings, which “photograph” not only the notion of time transient, but—this chapter argues—also a ritualized “emotional time” that expands during the musical flow and stops precisely where the common naturalistic time takes over the motion. This view reverses the meaning normally given to pictorial images that depict various aspects of vanitas: alive and flowing at the time of musical performance (“emotional time”); inert as emotionless, i.e. the time when musical instruments are inactive (“naturalistic time”). This “dramaturgy of time” closely resembles that managed in the newborn Italian opera, made up of extreme and emotionally charged temporal dilatations (aria) alternating with more neutral, plot-centered accelerations (recitative).