![wanderwoman > Death gambling for the world, 1800s
The thought came into its own with Christianity, whose strong emphasis on Divine 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, although there are equivalents in Buddhist art. 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 of 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's Latin rendering of Ecclesiasticus 7:40, "in all thy works be mindful of thy last end and thou wilt never sin.")
The most obvious places to look for memento mori meditations are in funereal art and architecture. Perhaps the most striking to contemporary minds is the transi, or cadaver tomb, 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, with its dancing depiction of the Grim Reaper 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 tombstones in the colonial United States frequently depicted winged skulls, skeletons, or angels snuffing out candles. See the themes associated with skull imagery.
Timepieces were formerly an apt reminder that your time on earth grows shorter with each passing minute. Public clocks 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 who would appear and strike the hour; some of the celebrated automaton clocks from Augsburg, 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 skull, embellished with the lines of Horace.
The artistic genre of still life was formerly called Vanitas, Latin for "vanity", because it was thought appropriate for each such painting to include some kind of symbol of mortality in each picture; these could be obvious ones like skulls, or more subtle ones, like a flower losing its petals. See the themes associated with the image of the skull.
After the invention of photography, many people had photographs taken of recently dead family members; given the technical limitations of daguerreotype 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's Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial and Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying. These works were part of a Jacobean cult of melancholia that marked the end of the Elizabethan era. In the late eighteenth century, literary elegies were a common genre; Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Edward Young's Night Thoughts were typical members of the genre.
Apart from the enormous genre of requiem and funeral music there is also a rich tradition of memento mori in the Early Music of Europe. Especially those facing the ever present death during the recurring bubonic plague pandemias from the 1340s onward (see Black Death) tried to toughen themselves by anticipating the inevitable in chants, from the simple Geisslerlieder of the Flagellant movement to the more refined cloistral or courtly songs. The lyrics often looked at life as a necessary and god-given vale of tears 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 ad mortem festinamus of the Catalan Llibre Vermell de Montserrat 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,
It 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 don't 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, 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, in which various walks of life are depicted as skeletons.
The motto of the French village of Èze is the phrase: "Isia Moriendo Renascor" (meaning "In death I am Reborn") and its emblem is a phoenix perched on a bone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori#Postclassical_Europe](/img/spacer.gif "wanderwoman > Death gambling for the world, 1800s
The thought came into its own with Christianity, whose strong emphasis on Divine 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, although there are equivalents in Buddhist art. 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 of 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's Latin rendering of Ecclesiasticus 7:40, \"in all thy works be mindful of thy last end and thou wilt never sin.\")
The most obvious places to look for memento mori meditations are in funereal art and architecture. Perhaps the most striking to contemporary minds is the transi, or cadaver tomb, 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, with its dancing depiction of the Grim Reaper 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 tombstones in the colonial United States frequently depicted winged skulls, skeletons, or angels snuffing out candles. See the themes associated with skull imagery.
Timepieces were formerly an apt reminder that your time on earth grows shorter with each passing minute. Public clocks 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 who would appear and strike the hour; some of the celebrated automaton clocks from Augsburg, 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 skull, embellished with the lines of Horace.
The artistic genre of still life was formerly called Vanitas, Latin for \"vanity\", because it was thought appropriate for each such painting to include some kind of symbol of mortality in each picture; these could be obvious ones like skulls, or more subtle ones, like a flower losing its petals. See the themes associated with the image of the skull.
After the invention of photography, many people had photographs taken of recently dead family members; given the technical limitations of daguerreotype 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's Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial and Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying. These works were part of a Jacobean cult of melancholia that marked the end of the Elizabethan era. In the late eighteenth century, literary elegies were a common genre; Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Edward Young's Night Thoughts were typical members of the genre.
Apart from the enormous genre of requiem and funeral music there is also a rich tradition of memento mori in the Early Music of Europe. Especially those facing the ever present death during the recurring bubonic plague pandemias from the 1340s onward (see Black Death) tried to toughen themselves by anticipating the inevitable in chants, from the simple Geisslerlieder of the Flagellant movement to the more refined cloistral or courtly songs. The lyrics often looked at life as a necessary and god-given vale of tears 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 ad mortem festinamus of the Catalan Llibre Vermell de Montserrat 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,
It 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 don't 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, 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, in which various walks of life are depicted as skeletons.
The motto of the French village of Èze is the phrase: \"Isia Moriendo Renascor\" (meaning \"In death I am Reborn\") and its emblem is a phoenix perched on a bone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori#Postclassical_Europe")
Fray Guillermo de San Julian, 1636
Workshop of Francisco de Zurbaran Spanish, 1598-1664
Oil on canvas
This painting belongs to a series of at least thiry-eight Mercedarian martyrs created by Zurbaran for the cloister of a Seville monastery. The sheer number of martyrs comprising the series stressesthe importance of martyrdom in defense of the Church and glorifies the role of the Mercedarians in that Effort. The Mercedarian Order was founded in the 13th ceentury for the purpose of ransoming Christian cpatives.
Fray Guillermo de San Julian was sent to Tunis to preach the Gospel. Considered the "Mercedarian St. Stephan," he was condemned for blasphemy and stoned to death.
Workshop of Francisco de Zurbaran Spanish, 1598-1664
Oil on canvas
This painting belongs to a series of at least thiry-eight Mercedarian martyrs created by Zurbaran for the cloister of a Seville monastery. The sheer number of martyrs comprising the series stressesthe importance of martyrdom in defense of the Church and glorifies the role of the Mercedarians in that Effort. The Mercedarian Order was founded in the 13th ceentury for the purpose of ransoming Christian cpatives.
Fray Guillermo de San Julian was sent to Tunis to preach the Gospel. Considered the "Mercedarian St. Stephan," he was condemned for blasphemy and stoned to death.
Fray Guillermo de San Julian, 1636
Workshop of Francisco de Zurbaran Spanish, 1598-1664
Oil on canvas
This painting belongs to a series of at least thiry-eight Mercedarian martyrs created by Zurbaran for the cloister of a Seville monastery. The sheer number of martyrs comprising the series stressesthe importance of martyrdom in defense of the Church and glorifies the role of the Mercedarians in that Effort. The Mercedarian Order was founded in the 13th ceentury for the purpose of ransoming Christian cpatives.
Fray Guillermo de San Julian was sent to Tunis to preach the Gospel. Considered the "Mercedarian St. Stephan," he was condemned for blasphemy and stoned to death.
Workshop of Francisco de Zurbaran Spanish, 1598-1664
Oil on canvas
This painting belongs to a series of at least thiry-eight Mercedarian martyrs created by Zurbaran for the cloister of a Seville monastery. The sheer number of martyrs comprising the series stressesthe importance of martyrdom in defense of the Church and glorifies the role of the Mercedarians in that Effort. The Mercedarian Order was founded in the 13th ceentury for the purpose of ransoming Christian cpatives.
Fray Guillermo de San Julian was sent to Tunis to preach the Gospel. Considered the "Mercedarian St. Stephan," he was condemned for blasphemy and stoned to death.
See photo in gallery
