Summary:
This article explores the history of art designed to remind us of our mortality. Then it arrives at the 21st century and looks at everyday items and activities that help us remember lost loved ones, and that our own days are numbered.

Details or Sample:
Through the ages, philosophers and religious leaders have been telling us that it’s not just when we lose a loved one that we should think of death. Following their lead, many artists have used their talents to remind us of our mortality. Most prevalent in relation to Christianity, but also seen in other religious art, the ideas really took off in the sixteen hundreds.

The most obvious memento mori objects in paintings are skulls, skeletons or dead game, but there are also more subtle ways of displaying the reminders. Flowers at the end of their life wilt and drop their petals. Lighted candles flicker and die when they reach the end of their wick. Soap bubbles burst and disappear when they collide with something. Fruit becomes over ripe and then rotten. While clocks and other timepieces continually tick away our lives, a sandglass, or egg timer, trickles our time away.

The genre of the vanitas painting was a still life that incorporated some of these objects to show that all the pleasures of life are transitory, and therefore worthless, compared to the heavenly life to come if we walk the straight and narrow path on earth.

Not surprisingly, they first became popular in the Netherlands after independence from its Catholic Spanish rulers allowed puritanical Protestant Calvinism to become the national religion. ...(more)

This was also the time of the colonization of America by puritan factions seeking a place where they could be free to worship in their own way. Their beliefs banned art that had no other use but to lift the spirits and make life more bearable. But they did allow ...(more)

Most of the churches across Europe contain monuments to the dead, occasionally simple, often much more elaborate. Effigies of their patrons for these monuments were often a mainstay of the careers of sculptors and stone masons. These are not only public displays of the power and wealth of the families involved. ...(more)

Burial ground and garden of remembrance memorials can also be grandly decorated, and often include the traditional sculpted symbols of memento mori. But even a simple verse on a gravestone can remind us that our turn will come and there is comfort for those believers who are sure of a future reunion.

Memorial seats are now so popular ...(more)

But we don’t have to go out of our homes to find reminders of our mortality. It’s almost as inevitable as death itself that any book of fiction or poetry you might have to hand will make some kind of reference to death. It was a central theme in the work of war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Vera Britain.

Even writers whose purpose is not to provide memento mori find it hard to avoid the theme because it is so inevitable that even fictional characters must have a brush with it at some time. All the classical writers, such as Alcott, the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Tolstoy, have written, or alluded to, famous death scenes.

Then there is the medium of film, seen in our homes on TV screens. And these days, the news films are as emotive as drama. Death is all around us. We no longer need the artists’ memento mori. But they can be comforting in showing us that we are all the same in the end, and in helping us remember those we have loved and hope to be reunited with in death.

Purchase this content for your website...

Pricing:
Usage:	$20	[Add to Cart]
Unique:	$40	[Add to Cart]
Full Rights:	$50	[Add to Cart]

Downloads: 0
Written by: jak
Available File Types:Text
Words: 790