The memento mori trope survives into the present day, albeit in differing locations. In the visually secular effigy monuments of the Elizabethan gentry, inscriptions urging the reader to ‘(r)emember the last things and…not sin again’ signified that death would come to everyone – but only spiritual public health would reduce the risk of eternal punishment and separation from God. 2 Even within the iconophobic Protestantism of the post-Reformation era, the memento mori trope persisted as a privileged mode of pious warning. Damnation would be added to death if the individual transgressed the rules of Catholic doctrine, such that scholars often trace a continuity between the motives of memento mori, and the biblical injunction: ‘Whatsoever thou takest in hand, remember the end, and thou shalt never do amiss’ (Ecclesiasticus 7:36). The entreaty to ‘remember’ death in memento mori was more than simply a call for ‘therapeutic contemplation’ 1 or the banal acceptance of the imminence of death it was a call to piety, to conformity. Prolific within its morbid imagery are the use of skull, skeleton and verminous or rotting flesh as ‘trope’ or symbol of the processes that eventually take away the person who lived, and who was once like us.Īt the height of its popularity between the 16th and 18th centuries, Church walls, tombs, jewellery, paintings, and so on frequently depicted death and decay. From the decomposed effigies of 15th-century ‘cadaver tombs’, to the humorous medieval iconography of the skeletal danse macabre, the works of this genre draw on the destructive physical changes that are a part of our understanding of death. The Latin phrase memento mori, meaning literally ‘remember to die’, encapsulates a rich and varied artistic tradition, dating back to the Middle Ages, of figuring death by symbolizing its literal processes and remainders. Indeed, awareness of one’s own mortality may well be one of the defining features of the ‘human condition’ – symbols of death appearing in most civilizations since artefacts have been made. Death has always held a morbid fascination for humans.
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