In the early 1900s novel Henry Brocken, for instance, one character exhorts: “‘Memento mori!’ say I, and smell the shower the sweeter for it.” Barbara Boehm, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, suggests that this inversion of memento mori isn’t exactly new, however, with carpe diem themes present in historical examples of memento mori art.Īrt historians indeed use memento mori as a technical term for artworks that contain reminders of mortality, including the classic skull but also hourglasses, candles (which burn out), and flowers (which decay). Īlthough memento mori was historically used to instruct one to ignore the ephemeral pleasures of earthly life, in modern contexts it has come to behave more like carpe diem -a call to enjoy life while one can. An 1830 story even notes that accurately dating events in one’s past can remind one of their age and serve as a memento mori. An art treatise from 1830 describes broken amphorae in classical art as a memento mori. An 1838 newspaper article from Edinburgh, Scotland, speaks of a coffin being kept in a home as a memento mori. Over time, the number of objects that could serve as a memento mori expanded. A comedic poem from London Magazine in 1750 describes the story of a man, who accidentally kills himself while trying to escape a scolding wife, as an allegorical memento mori. Echoing Shakespeare, the 1744 play The Modern Wife has a “portly” man compare another to a memento mori, likening the latter’s gaunt features to a skull. In 1708, a sermon titled “Philip’s Memento Mori,” instructing listeners to use possible rewards of the afterlife to govern their lives, was given at a funeral in London.ĭuring this same period, though, the memento mori was also being used in jest. The skull motif, along with the phrase memento mori, was used on numerous graves in New England in the 16s. In the first part of King Henry IV, published as early as 1598, Shakespeare has Falstaff jokingly compare his companion Bardolph’s face to “a death’s-head or a memento mori.” Such skulls as reminders of inevitable death came to be known as a memento mori. The hermits also kept skulls around the monastery and in their cells. Paul of France-a religious order in the 1620s and sometimes called the Brothers of the Dead-notably included the phrase memento mori on their seal, and were said to use it as a greeting among brothers. For instance, a 1579 poem addressed to a man on his deathbed, and headed by the epigraph “Memento Mori,” notes that the “flesh is frail” and implores the reader to seek mercy from God. The phrase memento mori emerged in late-1500s, early-1600s Christianity as an instruction to value eternal life of the spirit over the temporary life of the body.
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