Memento mori
Encyclopedia
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
of artistic work which varies widely, but which all share the same purpose: to remind people of their own mortality. The phrase has a tradition in art that dates back to antiquity.
Classical
Roman triumph
The Roman triumph was a civil ceremony and religious rite of ancient Rome, held to publicly celebrate and sanctify the military achievement of an army commander who had won great military successes, or originally and traditionally, one who had successfully completed a foreign war. In Republican...
. Standing behind the victorious general was his slave, who was tasked to remind the general that, though his highness was at his peak today, tomorrow he could fall or, more likely, be brought down. The servant conveyed this by telling the general that he should remember, "Memento mori." It is further possible that the servant said instead, "Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!": "Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man! Remember that you'll die!", as noted by Tertullian
Tertullian
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, anglicised as Tertullian , was a prolific early Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa. He is the first Christian author to produce an extensive corpus of Latin Christian literature. He also was a notable early Christian apologist and...
in his Apologeticus
Apologeticus
Apologeticus or Apologeticum is Tertullian's most famous work, consisting of apologetic and polemic; it was written in Carthage in the summer or autumn of 197 AD, during the reign of Septimius Severus. In this work Tertullian defends Christianity, demanding legal toleration and that Christians be...
.
Medieval Europe
The thought came into its own with ChristianityChristianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
, whose strong emphasis on Divine Judgment
Divine Judgment
Divine judgment means the judgment of God or other supreme beings within a religion. The concept is prominent in Abrahamic religions, most significantly in the Last judgment.-Objective and subjective judgment:...
, Heaven, Hell, and the salvation of the soul brought death to the forefront of consciousness. Most memento mori works are products of Christian art
Christian art
Christian art is sacred art produced in an attempt to illustrate, supplement and portray in tangible form the principles of Christianity, though other definitions are possible. Most Christian groups use or have used art to some extent, although some have had strong objections to some forms of...
, although there are equivalents in Buddhist art
Buddhist art
Buddhist art originated on the Indian subcontinent following the historical life of Siddhartha Gautama, 6th to 5th century BC, and thereafter evolved by contact with other cultures as it spread throughout Asia and the world....
. In the Christian context, the memento mori acquires a moralizing purpose quite opposed to the Nunc est bibendum theme of Classical antiquity. To the Christian, the prospect of death serves to emphasize the emptiness and fleetingness of earthly pleasures, luxuries, and achievements, and thus also as an invitation to focus one's thoughts on the prospect of the afterlife. A Biblical injunction often associated with the memento mori in this context is In omnibus operibus tuis memorare novissima tua, et in aeternum non peccabis (the Vulgate
Vulgate
The Vulgate is a late 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It was largely the work of St. Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 to make a revision of the old Latin translations...
's Latin rendering of Ecclesiasticus
Sirach
The Book of the All-Virtuous Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira , commonly called the Wisdom of Sirach or simply Sirach, and also known as Ecclesiasticus or Siracides , is a work from the early 2nd century B.C. written by the Jewish scribe Jesus ben Sirach of Jerusalem...
, "in all thy works be mindful of thy last end and thou wilt never sin.") This finds ritual expression in the Catholic rites of Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday, in the calendar of Western Christianity, is the first day of Lent and occurs 46 days before Easter. It is a moveable fast, falling on a different date each year because it is dependent on the date of Easter...
when ashes are placed upon the worshipers' heads with the words "Remember Man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return."
The most obvious places to look for memento mori meditations are in funeral art and architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
. Perhaps the most striking to contemporary minds is the transi, or cadaver tomb
Cadaver tomb
A cadaver tomb or transi is a church monument or tomb featuring an effigy in the macabre form of a decomposing corpse. The topos was particularly characteristic of the later Middle Ages....
, a tomb which depicts the decayed corpse of the deceased. This became a fashion in the tombs of the wealthy in the fifteenth century, and surviving examples still create a stark reminder of the vanity of earthly riches. The famous danse macabre
Danse Macabre
Dance of Death, also variously called Danse Macabre , Danza de la Muerte , Dansa de la Mort , Danza Macabra , Dança da Morte , Totentanz , Dodendans , is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's...
, with its dancing depiction of the Grim Reaper
Death (personification)
The concept of death as a sentient entity has existed in many societies since the beginning of history. In English, Death is often given the name Grim Reaper and, from the 15th century onwards, came to be shown as a skeletal figure carrying a large scythe and clothed in a black cloak with a hood...
carrying off rich and poor alike, is another well known example of the memento mori theme. This and similar depictions of Death decorated many European churches. Later, Puritan
Puritan
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...
tomb stones in the colonial United States frequently depicted winged skulls, skeletons, or angel
Angel
Angels are mythical beings often depicted as messengers of God in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles along with the Quran. The English word angel is derived from the Greek ἄγγελος, a translation of in the Hebrew Bible ; a similar term, ملائكة , is used in the Qur'an...
s snuffing out candles. These are among the numerous themes associated with skull imagery.
Clock
A clock is an instrument used to indicate, keep, and co-ordinate time. The word clock is derived ultimately from the Celtic words clagan and clocca meaning "bell". A silent instrument missing such a mechanism has traditionally been known as a timepiece...
s would be decorated with mottos such as ultima forsan ("perhaps the last" [hour]) or vulnerant omnes, ultima necat ("they all wound, and the last kills"). Even today, clocks often carry the motto tempus fugit, "time flies." Old striking clocks often sported automata
Automaton
An automaton is a self-operating machine. The word is sometimes used to describe a robot, more specifically an autonomous robot. An alternative spelling, now obsolete, is automation.-Etymology:...
who would appear and strike the hour; some of the celebrated automaton clocks from Augsburg
Augsburg
Augsburg is a city in the south-west of Bavaria, Germany. It is a university town and home of the Regierungsbezirk Schwaben and the Bezirk Schwaben. Augsburg is an urban district and home to the institutions of the Landkreis Augsburg. It is, as of 2008, the third-largest city in Bavaria with a...
, Germany had Death striking the hour. The several computerized "death clocks" revive this old idea. Private people carried smaller reminders of their own mortality. Mary, Queen of Scots, owned a large watch carved in the form of a silver
Silver
Silver is a metallic chemical element with the chemical symbol Ag and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it has the highest electrical conductivity of any element and the highest thermal conductivity of any metal...
skull, embellished with the lines of Horace.
A version of the theme in the artistic genre of still life is more often referred to as a vanitas
Vanitas
In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic work of art especially associated with Northern European still life painting in Flanders and the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries, though also common in other places and periods. The word is Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated...
, Latin for "vanity". These include symbols of mortality, whether obvious ones like skulls, or more subtle ones, like a flower losing its petals. See the themes associated with the image of the skull.
Post-mortem photography
Post-mortem photography is the practice of photographing the recently deceased.-History and popularity:...
taken of recently dead family members; given the technical limitations of daguerreotype
Daguerreotype
The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process. The image is a direct positive made in the camera on a silvered copper plate....
photography, this was one way to get the portrait subject to sit still.
Memento mori was also an important literary theme. Well known literary meditations on death in English prose include Sir Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne was an English author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric....
's Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial
Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial
Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk, is a work by Sir Thomas Browne, published in 1658 as the first part of a two-part work that concludes with The Garden of Cyrus....
and Jeremy Taylor
Jeremy Taylor
Jeremy Taylor was a clergyman in the Church of England who achieved fame as an author during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. He is sometimes known as the "Shakespeare of Divines" for his poetic style of expression and was often presented as a model of prose writing...
's Holy Living and Holy Dying
Holy Living and Holy Dying
Holy Living and Holy Dying is the collective title of two books of Christian devotion by Jeremy Taylor. They were originally published as The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living, 1650 and The Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying, 1651....
. These works were part of a Jacobean
Jacobean era
The Jacobean era refers to the period in English and Scottish history that coincides with the reign of King James VI of Scotland, who also inherited the crown of England in 1603 as James I...
cult of melancholia that marked the end of the Elizabethan era
Elizabethan era
The Elizabethan era was the epoch in English history of Queen Elizabeth I's reign . Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history...
. In the late eighteenth century, literary elegies
Elegy
In literature, an elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.-History:The Greek term elegeia originally referred to any verse written in elegiac couplets and covering a wide range of subject matter, including epitaphs for tombs...
were a common genre; Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray was a poet, letter-writer, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University.-Early life and education:...
's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. The poem’s origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray’s thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742. Originally titled Stanza's Wrote in a Country...
and Edward Young
Edward Young
Edward Young was an English poet, best remembered for Night Thoughts.-Early life:He was the son of Edward Young, later Dean of Salisbury, and was born at his father's rectory at Upham, near Winchester, where he was baptized on 3 July 1683. He was educated at Winchester College, and matriculated...
's Night Thoughts were typical members of the genre.
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Early music
Early music is generally understood as comprising all music from the earliest times up to the Renaissance. However, today this term has come to include "any music for which a historically appropriate style of performance must be reconstructed on the basis of surviving scores, treatises,...
of Europe. Especially those facing the ever present death during the recurring bubonic plague pandemics from the 1340s onward tried to toughen themselves by anticipating the inevitable in chants, from the simple Geisslerlieder
Geisslerlieder
In medieval music, the Geisslerlieder, or Flagellant songs, were the songs of the wandering bands of flagellants, who overspread Europe during two periods of mass hysteria: the first during the middle of the 13th century, and the second during the Black Death in 1349...
of the Flagellant
Flagellant
Flagellants are practitioners of an extreme form of mortification of their own flesh by whipping it with various instruments.- History :Flagellantism was a 13th and 14th centuries movement, consisting of radicals in the Catholic Church. It began as a militant pilgrimage and was later condemned by...
movement to the more refined cloistral or courtly songs. The lyrics often looked at life as a necessary and god-given vale of tears
Vale of tears
"Vale of tears" is a Christian phrase referring to life and its earthly sorrows, that are only left behind when one leaves the world and enters heaven...
with death as a ransom and reminded people to lead sinless lives to stand a chance at Judgement Day. Two stanzas typical of memento mori in mediaeval music are from the virelai
Virelai
A virelai is a form of medieval French verse used often in poetry and music. It is one of the three formes fixes and was one of the most common verse forms set to music in Europe from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.A virelai is similar to a rondeau...
ad mortem festinamus of the Catalan Llibre Vermell de Montserrat
Llibre Vermell de Montserrat
The Llibre Vermell de Montserrat is a manuscript collection of devotional texts, containing amongst others some late medieval songs. The 14th century manuscript was compiled in and is still located at the monastery of Montserrat outside Barcelona in Catalonia.-The manuscript:The manuscript was...
from 1399:
- Vita brevis breviter in brevi finietur,
- Mors venit velociter quae neminem veretur,
- Omnia mors perimit et nulli miseretur.
- Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus.
- Life is short, and shortly it will end;
- Death comes quickly and respects no one,
- Death destroys everything and takes pity on no one.
- To death we are hastening, let us refrain from sinning.
- Ni conversus fueris et sicut puer factus
- Et vitam mutaveris in meliores actus,
- Intrare non poteris regnum Dei beatus.
- Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus.
- If you do not turn back and become like a child,
- And change your life for the better,
- You will not be able to enter, blessed, the Kingdom of God.
- To death we are hastening, let us refrain from sinning.
Much memento mori art is associated with the Mexican festival, Day of the Dead
Day of the Dead
Day of the Dead is a Mexican holiday celebrated throughout Mexico and around the world in many cultures. The holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died. It is particularly celebrated in Mexico, where it attains the quality...
, including even skull-shaped candies, and bread loaves adorned with bread "bones". It was also famously expressed in the works of the Mexican engraver José Guadalupe Posada
José Guadalupe Posada
Jose Guadalupe Posada: was a Mexican cartoonist illustrator and artist whose work has influenced many Latin American artists and cartoonists because of its satirical acuteness and political engagement....
, in which various walks of life are depicted as skeletons.
Another example of memento mori is provided by the chapels of bones, such as the Capela dos Ossos
Capela dos Ossos
The Capela dos Ossos is one of the best known monuments in Évora, Portugal. It is a small interior chapel located next to the entrance of the Church of St. Francis...
in Évora
Évora
Évora is a municipality in Portugal. It has total area of with a population of 55,619 inhabitants. It is the seat of the Évora District and capital of the Alentejo region. The municipality is composed of 19 civil parishes, and is located in Évora District....
or the Capuchin Crypt
Capuchin Crypt
The Capuchin Crypt is a small space comprising several tiny chapels located beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini on the Via Veneto near Piazza Barberini in Rome, Italy. It contains the skeletal remains of 4,000 bodies believed to be Capuchin friars buried by their order...
in Rome. These are chapels where the walls are totally or partially covered by human remains, mostly bones. The entrance to the former has the sentence "We bones, lying here bare, await for yours".
The motto of the French village of Èze
Èze
Èze is a commune in the Alpes-Maritimes département in southeastern France, not far from the city of Nice.-History:The area surrounding Èze was first populated around 2000 BC as a commune situated near Mount Bastide. The earliest occurrence of the name "Èze" can be found in the maritime books of...
is the phrase: "Moriendo Renascor" (meaning "In death I am Reborn") and its emblem is a phoenix perched on a bone.
Puritan America
Colonial American art saw a large number of "memento mori" images due to PuritanPuritan
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...
influence. The Puritan community in 17th century North America looked down upon art because they believed it drew the faithful away from God, and if away from God, then it could only lead to the devil. However, portraits were considered historical records, and as such they were allowed. Thomas Smith
Thomas Smith (painter)
Captain Thomas Smith was an artist and mariner who lived somewhere between 1600 and 1700 and completed a self-portrait circa 1680. He lived in Boston and was a Puritan as evidenced by his dress and symbolism in the portrait. The painting also includes the following poem, signed T.S...
, a 17th century Puritan, fought in many naval battles, and also painted. In his self-portrait we see a typical puritan "memento mori" with a skull, suggesting his imminent death.
The poem under the skull emphasizes Smith's acceptance of death:
Why why should I the World be minding, Therein a World of Evils Finding. Then Farwell World: Farwell thy jarres, thy Joies thy Toies thy Wiles thy Warrs. Truth Sounds Retreat: I am not sorye. The Eternall Drawes to him my heart, By Faith (which can thy Force Subvert) To Crowne me (after Grace) with Glory.
See also
- Ars moriendiArs moriendiThe Ars moriendi are two related Latin texts dating from about 1415 and 1450 which offer advice on the protocols and procedures of a good death, explaining how to "die well" according to Christian precepts of the late Middle Ages...
- Danse MacabreDanse MacabreDance of Death, also variously called Danse Macabre , Danza de la Muerte , Dansa de la Mort , Danza Macabra , Dança da Morte , Totentanz , Dodendans , is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's...
- Et in Arcadia egoEt in Arcadia ego"Et in Arcadia ego" is a Latin phrase that most famously appears as the title of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin . They are pastoral paintings depicting idealized shepherds from classical antiquity, clustering around an austere tomb...
- Sic transit gloria mundiSic transit gloria mundiSic transit gloria mundi is a Latin phrase that means "Thus passes the glory of the world". It has been interpreted as "Worldly things are fleeting." It is possibly an adaptation of a phrase in Thomas à Kempis's 1418 work The Imitation of Christ: "O quam cito transit gloria mundi" .The phrase was...
- Ubi suntUbi suntUbi sunt is a phrase taken from the Latin Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?, meaning "Where are those who were before us?"...
- VanitasVanitasIn the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic work of art especially associated with Northern European still life painting in Flanders and the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries, though also common in other places and periods. The word is Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated...
External links
- Isaiah 22
- Apologeticus
- Memento mori and vanitas elements in the funerary art at St. John's Co-Cathedral, Valetta, Malta, an article on memento mori and ars moriendi appearing in the journal "Treasures of Malta", December 2004.