Memento Mori: Symbols and Meanings
- gothpersona
- Mar 28
- 13 min read
Updated: Apr 1
Powerful and haunting, the memento mori motif is a common theme in art from the medieval period and the Renaissance–and beyond. Appearing in everything from paintings to church architecture to golden rings, this artistic theme was a huge part of everyday life in Europe from around the 1300s-1700s, and it still lingers on in our systems of symbolism to this day.
Memento Mori Origin & Meaning
“Memento mori” is a Latin phrase that means “remember you must die,” or, more literally, “remember to die.” It is a reminder that human life is finite and death awaits us all. If that doesn’t sound especially cheerful, keep in mind that its use became popularized during a period of European history marked by political upheaval and the Black Death. This Latin motto and its associated artistic images (skulls, skeletons, etc.) were most prominent from the late 1300s to the Renaissance and into what is commonly referred to as the early modern period, the 1600s and early 1700s.
Although it reached its peak in medieval and Renaissance Europe, the memento mori motif has its origins in Roman and other pre-Christian cultures. For example, a Roman mosaic discovered at Pompeii depicting a skull and the wheel of fortune carries the same message of looming mortality.
Skulls were also important in Old Norse culture, where they were used to make amulets and held ritual significance. To the pagan Celts of ancient Ireland, Britain, France, and Spain, the head was the seat of the soul, and Roman sources reported that the Celts practiced ritual beheading and displayed the skulls of their enemies. (Though this was probably less a reminder of mortality than a way of absorbing the rival warrior’s power.)
The Roman emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” Another famous Roman stoic, Seneca, wrote that we should live every day “as a complete life.” This sentiment is what grew to become the memento mori theme in art and spirituality.
Christian Memento Mori
This idea resonated strongly with early Christians, who viewed human life as preparation for, as the Nicene Creed puts it, “the life of the world to come.” It was useful to remind the faithful that life on earth was fleeting and judgment was always at hand. Images of skulls were a simple, powerful shorthand for conveying this idea. As Europe gradually became Christianized between the Roman period and the early Middle Ages, elements of pagan religious traditions were incorporated into Christian practice. It’s possible that the skull imagery that had been a major part of pagan religions was also being translated into a new Christian idiom.
Churchyards in England carry skull carvings dating to about 1000 C.E., some of the earliest memento mori art on record. Many Christian churches adopted the visual language of the memento mori to remind parishioners to repent before it was too late–since you could never be sure when your last day on earth might be. This message took on a new resonance when the bubonic plague wiped out entire villages and caused chaos throughout medieval Europe in the 14th century.
Memento Mori Symbols
The most universal memento mori symbol is a skull or skeleton, but other common motifs representing the same idea include:
An hourglass
Dead flowers
Soap bubbles
Coffins
Butterflies
An extinguished candle
Spilled wine
Watches and clocks
These images often appear together in still life paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries, a genre of painting known as vanitas, or vanity, that flourished in what is now the Netherlands.
Memento Mori Memento Vivere
The other side of the coin of memento mori imagery is its opposite: memento vivere. This phrase, Latin for “remember to live,” is a reminder not to dwell too much on doom and gloom when there’s life to be lived. It’s a similar sentiment to that other popular Latin phrase, carpe diem, or “seize the day.” Unlike the more famous memento mori, there is no specific artistic motif associated with the phrase.
Memento vivere is about more than just embracing spontaneity and pleasure, though. It’s also an exhortation to approach life with mindfulness. Cultivating relationships, expanding your mind, and achieving goals are things that require conscious effort. In Stoic philosophy, it’s considered important to approach every aspect of life with intention. Memento vivere means “remember to live” in the sense that it’s easy to drift through life without really thinking about it, so the antidote to that complacency is living with conscious thought. It’s also a reminder to be grateful for the time we have.
Memento vivere is usually stated as a counterpoint to memento mori. Taken together, the two phrases mean that we can’t know how long life will go on, so we should remember to make the most of it every day.
Mourning Rings
In the 1600s, it became popular among the aristocracy and wealthy members of European society to wear mourning rings inscribed with the names of deceased loved ones as well as skeletons, coffins, or skulls as a reminder of mortality–and a killer fashion statement.
Other types of popular memento mori jewelry included brooches, pendants, and lockets depicting tombs, skulls, and bones. This tradition was also seen in the Victorian era, when people wore mourning jewelry made from the hair of the dead woven into intricate knots and displayed in brooches and lockets.
Carved ivory trinkets with memento mori imagery such as skulls were also popular during this period. Often, rosaries would have skull-shaped beads and other embellishments meant to remind devotees that death was always on the horizon.
Memento Mori Architecture
Unsurprisingly, funerary art and architecture that has survived since the Renaissance and early modern era contains a lot of memento mori imagery, such as skulls and bones carved into tombstones and grave monuments.
Some of the most striking examples are the cadaver tombs or transi that became popular among the European elite from the late Middle Ages through the late 16th century. These monuments depicted the decomposing corpses of the tomb occupants, often sculpted in marble and shown wrapped in a burial shroud–a gruesome reminder of the triumph of death. One of the most famous is the tomb of Prince of Orange René of Châlon, who died in 1544 at age 25.
European churches and cathedrals often contain carvings, paintings, and mosaics with a memento mori theme, such as these ones throughout England. Gothic cathedrals of the 13th and 14th centuries especially are known for having morbid or fantastical details known as grotesques included by stonemasons and carpenters such as gargoyles, carved ceiling beams, and other decorative elements. Often, these included death’s head imagery.
Some chapels in Portugal, Poland, and Czechia are even decorated from floor to ceiling with actual human bones dating from medieval times. Placing reminders of the fragility of human life in churches was a way to remind worshippers of their spiritual obligations–since earthly life was just the first stage in the soul’s progression.
Several major European cities also have catacombs, notably Paris, Palermo, and Rome. These are systems of tunnels lined with the bones of the dead that can sprawl for miles beneath the city streets, often dating back to Roman times. During reconstruction in the wake of World War II, London archeologists discovered previously unknown tombs and crypts dating back to the medieval and Roman periods beneath the city.
In some ancient chapels and monasteries, there are whole rooms dedicated to the preservation and display of bones. These are called ossuaries, and they usually exist in places where burial space is limited such as religious orders. Once a body had decomposed, the bones were then moved to an ossuary to make space in the tomb for the next occupant. The result is a space where walls of bones create a breathtaking metaphor for death as a communal fate.
Memento Mori in Art
From the medieval period onward, memento mori imagery has appeared frequently in European painting, etching, and sculpture, as well as in mosaics and tapestries.
Religious art was fertile ground for memento mori imagery, as depictions of the penitent Mary Magdalene often show her contemplating a skull, such as this one painted by El Greco (c. 1570). St. Jerome is often pictured as an elderly hermit writing next to a skull as well. In Christian art, it often symbolized someone who had taken on an ascetic existence and set aside worldly cares.
With the coming of the Renaissance, portraits that depicted likenesses of individuals rather than stylized or idealized types became a prevalent part of European artistic culture. Often, those sitting for a portrait would be shown with a skull nearby on their desk or a shelf, or even holding one as a reminder that human life is fleeting.
Throughout the Renaissance and early modern era, memento mori art became less tied to its Christian roots and more of a universal symbol for the impermanence of life. The effect was less didactic than in medieval art and more philosophical, as, for example, artists like Salvator Rosa painted self-portraits in which they cradled human skulls. By the time of Rembrandt’s famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp (1632) the cadaver on display is more of a prop in the drama than a grave lesson about the passage of time–the true subjects are the individuals in the surgeons' guild and their expressive faces.
Memento Mori Imagery Around the World
Although memento mori art is largely associated with Western Europe, it is also very present in Mexican art, which has a long tradition of depicting skulls. Calaveras, representations of human skulls associated with the Day of the Dead, are just one example of this rich artistic tradition. The motif can also be observed in art of Central Africa and Indonesia, as well as in Japanese kusozu paintings depicting nine stages of a decaying corpse. This theme is derived from Buddhist teachings that encourage the contemplation of mortality.
Memento Mori in Literature
In addition to its prevalence in visual art and architecture, memento mori has been a major theme in literature. From bible verses to ecclesiastical writings, the theme of death approaching was a major influence on the medieval church, and this filtered into secular writing as well.
Perhaps the most famous example from the Middle Ages is Dante Aleghieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy. Written in the early 1300s, it tells the story of Dante experiencing a visionary journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven. His guide through the nine circles of hell is the Roman poet Virgil, while his lost love Beatrice takes him through the spheres of paradise.
In Dante’s Inferno, the first and most famous part of the trilogy, the poet learns the fate of the unhappy souls cast into hell, who have passed through gates marked, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” This poem is largely where we get our cultural notion of hell as having layers where the damned are tortured for all eternity with ironic punishments for their crimes. (There is no theological basis for this idea–or, presumably, for so many of Dante’s Florentine political enemies getting the sharp end of the pitchfork.)
The focus on eternal punishment, salvation through purgatory, and divine reward forces the reader to contemplate mortality. The fact that Dante populates his afterlife with characters from history and mythology and recently deceased public figures his audience would have been familiar with makes his message hit that much harder.
Memento Mori in Shakespeare
Shakespeare wrote often about the ephemerality of life, most famously in the “Alas, poor Yorick” soliloquy from Hamlet. In this speech, Hamlet addresses the skull of the court jester Yorick who used to make him laugh as a child. He meditates on the idea of death as a great leveller, noting that the graveyard is full of lawyers, great ladies, landowners, and courtiers who are now, like Julius Caesar, “dead and turned to clay.”
This scene is especially striking because it takes the memento mori image of a skull representing inevitable death and removes it from its medieval Christian context. There is no moralizing in Hamlet’s musings; instead, he treats death as a kind of cosmic joke–which is emphasized by the fact that he’s talking to the skull of a comedian. Written in the Renaissance, this passage from Shakespeare shows the broader cultural trend of European thought moving away from religion and toward secular humanism.
The bloody tragedy Macbeth is also haunted by mortality–it even has a ghost. This play features Macbeth’s “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” speech in which he contemplates the death of his wife, who influenced him to commit heinous acts to become king, and his own meaningless existence:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
All Macbeth’s ambition has come to nothing; he realizes he is a “brief candle” about to burn out.
A Christmas Carol: Memento Mori Meets Holiday Cheer
For a beloved Christmas story, Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol sure does have a lot of death in it. First, we meet the ghost of Jacob Marley, the miserly Scrooge’s dead business partner who is weighed down by chains in the afterlife because of his greedy ways.
Next, the ghosts of Christmas Past and Present show Scrooge visions of festivity, before the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come goes in for the kill–literally–showing Scrooge his own tombstone where he rests unmourned because of his miserable, self-serving ways. In the end, Scrooge learns his lesson, embraces the spirit of Christmas, and becomes generous. All it takes is a little memento mori.
Victorian Memento Mori
The Victorian Era (1837-1901) saw a resurgence in popular interest in death, mourning rituals, and memento mori imagery. Weird tales and horror stories like those written by Edgar Allan Poe exploded in popularity, often featuring themes of madness, murder, premature burial, and ghostly hauntings. The Late Victorian period also saw a huge surge of interest in mediums, spiritualism, and seances, even as science brought technological wonders like lightbulbs, telegraphs, and steam engines.
At the same time, new technologies like photography allowed people to capture the moment of death for posterity. Death portraits became popular, as the recently deceased were photographed–sometimes even posed upright in their coffins–for loved ones to have a keepsake to remember them by. In an era before vaccines when young children frequently died of childhood diseases, this was a way for their families to be able to mourn and remember.
Victorian memento mori imagery has a more sentimental, personal quality than the vanitas paintings and carved skulls of earlier periods in history. This is reflected in cultural practices surrounding death and mourning.
Victorian Mourning Dress
Mourning became highly visible in Victorian fashion as compared to earlier eras like the Regency and 18th century, as etiquette demanded that widows should dress in black from head to toe for a certain period of time, typically two years, and men in mourning wore black crepe armbands and hatbands. The stages of mourning were dictated by how closely the person was related to the deceased, and involved elaborate rules about what types of fabrics and embellishments could be worn.
For example, a widow in deep mourning was expected to wear:
Black crepe (silk) bonnet
No jewelry
Crepe veil 3 yards in length with 2/3rds of the veil at the back and 1/3 over the face
Veil thrown back after 6 months
Crepe collar and cuffs
This was likely influenced by Queen Victoria, who wore mourning attire for forty years after the death of her husband Prince Albert in 1861. The Victorian mourning aesthetic with black lace veils and all-black ensembles is still a large influence on goth fashion to this day. As mentioned above, mourning jewelry was a significant trend in Victorian fashion as well.
This vogue for mourning attire had a sociological effect as well as aesthetic one. It served to make death and grief much more visible in daily life than it is today, as people from all social classes and walks of life would dress in black upon the death of a loved one. Even the poor who couldn’t afford new clothes would dye their everyday clothing black. With so many people following Victorian death etiquette, it would be difficult to go out in public and not see at least one person in mourning at any given time.
It’s easy to imagine that this created a memento mori effect, since mourning fashion was a tangible reminder of death the average person would encounter practically every day. Overall, the Victorian Era’s fascination with death and its rituals has left us with many, many artifacts showing how death was on everyone’s mind.
Modern Memento Mori Images
While it has origins in the medieval period and earlier, there is no shortage of memento mori imagery in the modern world. With the medical and scientific advancements that exploded with the turn of the 20th century and beyond, death became less of an ever-present specter in people’s lives, but the image of the skull still carried powerful associations.
Skulls still haunt our symbolic systems in the modern era, appearing frequently in everything from safety posters to political cartoons to World War II and Cold War propaganda. A skull and crossbones is also a common symbol for poison (and piracy). These uses of skull and skeleton images tend to be associated with immediate danger rather than the more abstract, philosophical meaning of the memento mori, but its legacy remains.
This 1904 etching by Belgian artist James Ensor shows a death’s head hovering over personifications of the seven deadly sins, updating the memento mori motif for a new century. Ensor used this visual language not out of religious piety, but instead as a way of expressing his disgust with society and the modern world.
Modern artists from Frida Kahlo to Salvador Dali to Picasso have all made use of skulls and other classic memento mori imagery, taking the Christian iconography of the Middle Ages and adapting it for a new era. These 20th-century artists took deeply symbolic images of the past and used them to comment on war, oppression, and internal psychological states.
Striking memento mori themes have occurred often in film as well, from the personification of Death playing chess with a knight in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) to the long-suffering Grim Reaper played for laughs in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991). There are also many movies and TV episodes called Memento Mori, from a 1999 South Korean horror romance, to a 1992 film about elderly friends in 1950s London, to an episode of the hit 90s TV series The X-Files.
In 2007, the famous British sculptor Damien Hirst created an art piece called For the Love of God, a platinum cast of a human skull covered in over 8,000 diamonds–an ironic reminder that riches are ultimately fleeting that nevertheless sold for £50 million. This is an especially famous modern example of our never ending thirst for art that circles the theme of death.
The memento mori theme isn’t just seen in visual art either. In the 21st century, musical artists as diverse as Mac Miller, The Weeknd, David Bowie, and Lady Gaga have used skulls and memento mori references in their work and music videos. (And that’s without even scratching the surface of goth, deathrock, and metal artists.)
For centuries, humanity has been fascinated by the image of the skull and all that it symbolizes. In its hollow eyes, we can’t help but see our own eventual fate reflected back at us. At the same time, there is stark beauty to be found in this simple, elemental image of mortality. Time may keep marching forward, but the memento mori remains a poignant reminder to live every day like it’s your last–because it could be.