Memento mori: the skull as decoration, from Roman mosaics to Victorian mourning

A skull on a shelf reads as modern taste, or as a teenage phase, depending on who is looking. It is neither. The skull has been a decorative object in Europe for something like two thousand years, it has been respectable for most of that time, and for long stretches it was the opposite of transgressive: it was what careful, wealthy, pious people put on their jewellery. This is a short account of how it got from there to here.

What the phrase means

Memento mori is Latin for remember that you will die. It is an instruction, not a mood. The imagery attached to it was supposed to do a job: shorten your sense of your own remaining time, and change how you behaved today as a result.

There is a popular story that a slave rode behind a Roman general in his triumph whispering the phrase in his ear. The idea that a reminder of mortality was built into the triumph does appear in later writing, but the wording varies between sources and the neat Latin tag we use now is not reliably the wording anyone actually used. Treat it as a tradition about Rome rather than a transcript from it.

Rome put skeletons on the table

The strongest surviving Roman evidence is decorative rather than textual. A mosaic from Pompeii, now in the archaeological museum in Naples, shows a skull hanging below a carpenter's level, with a beggar's bundle on one side of the beam and a sceptre and purple cloth on the other. The point is blunt: death levels the rich man and the poor one.

Romans also made small articulated skeleton figurines in bronze and silver, and skeletons appear on drinking cups and lamps. Petronius, writing in the first century, has a host at a dinner party produce a silver skeleton and pose it on the table while making a short speech about how we shall all be like this. Whether or not that specific scene happened, the objects to do it with exist in museums.

This is the pattern that repeats for the next eighteen centuries. The skull turns up not in horror but in luxury: on expensive tableware, at good dinners, among people with the leisure to be reminded.

The Middle Ages made it a story

Medieval Europe gave the skull narratives. The Three Living and the Three Dead, which appears from the thirteenth century onward in manuscripts and wall paintings, shows three young noblemen meeting three corpses who tell them what they are about to become. The danse macabre, from the fifteenth century, lines up the living in rank order, from pope and emperor down to labourer and child, each partnered by a skeleton.

Tombs went the same way. The transi or cadaver tomb, which appears in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, carved the dead person twice: in state on the top, and as a decaying body underneath. It was commissioned by the person it depicted, in advance, at considerable expense.

What all of this shares is an audience assumed to be reading rather than shuddering. The imagery was didactic and widely understood, and it was often funded by the church or by the wealthiest people available.

Then it became jewellery

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the skull had shrunk to wearable size. Memento mori rings carried enamelled skulls and coffins and mottoes; watches were made in the shape of skulls, which turns the reminder into a joke about time that you then carry in your pocket. Holbein hid an anamorphic skull across the floor of The Ambassadors in 1533, visible properly only from one oblique angle.

Dutch painting of the seventeenth century built a whole genre on it. The vanitas still life assembles a skull with a guttering candle, a watch, cut flowers, bubbles and expensive objects, all of them chosen because they are either already decaying or about to.

An hourglass belongs to the same vocabulary, and it is the one item from that vocabulary that still does its original job. Watching sand run out of a half hour glass is the vanitas argument in physical form, and unlike a painted candle it actually finishes.

Gravestones, and the point at which it turns

Colonial New England carved thousands of winged death's heads on headstones through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a bare skull with wings, sometimes with an hourglass or crossed bones. Over the course of the eighteenth century that motif softens into a winged cherub face, and then, by around 1800, into an urn with a willow.

That drift from skull to urn is the single clearest marker of the change in taste. The subject has not changed. Somebody has still died. What has changed is whether it is acceptable to show the body.

The Victorians took the skull out

Nineteenth-century mourning was enormous, highly organised and extremely commercial, and it was almost entirely skull-free. The vocabulary became urns, willows, broken columns, clasped hands, forget-me-nots, ivy and above all hair: plaited, woven and set behind glass in lockets and rings.

The skull survived in narrower places. It stayed in masonic imagery, in military insignia, in anatomy, and in the Jolly Roger. It did not come back as mainstream ornament until the twentieth century, and when it did it arrived with a meaning it had never previously carried, which was rebellion.

This is worth knowing if you like the imagery. A skull on a Victorian brooch would have read as old-fashioned, even eccentric. A skull on a seventeenth-century ring read as devout. Only recently has it read as a statement about yourself.

Why it still works as a shape

Strip the history out and the skull remains an unusually good object to make things from. It is close to bilaterally symmetrical, it has deep eye sockets that read as dark whatever the lighting, and it keeps its outline when scaled down to the size of a ring. Very few organic forms do all three.

That is why it survives best as a functional object rather than as a decoration. A skull that holds a pair of glasses borrows the shape for its geometry, because the brow ridge is already a hook.

A skull-shaped goblet does the same thing from the other direction: a cranium is already a bowl, and the Romans had worked that out with their drinking cups long before anybody thought it was transgressive.

The honest version of the motif is the old one, not the rebellious one. It is an object, it is a shape, and the only argument it makes is the oldest and most literal one available.

Questions people actually ask

What does memento mori actually mean?

It is Latin for remember that you will die. It names a tradition of art and objects, from Roman mosaics to Victorian gravestones, meant to remind the owner of their own mortality.

Did the Victorians use skulls in mourning jewellery?

Rarely. Victorian mourning imagery favoured urns, willows, clasped hands, flowers and woven hair. The skull was common in seventeenth and eighteenth century mourning rings, then fell out of fashionable use.

What is a vanitas painting?

A still life, most associated with seventeenth century Dutch painting, that assembles objects chosen for being temporary: a skull, a snuffed candle, a watch, cut flowers, bubbles. The subject is the passing of time.