What distinguishes Baroque mourning jewellery from later Victorian work?

Three central differences. Imagery: the Baroque is explicitly memento mori - skull, skeleton, hourglass, scythe; the Victorian is implicit and material (a matt black surface). Addressee: Baroque mourning jewellery admonishes the wearer about their own mortality; Victorian mourning jewellery marks mourning for another. Code: the Baroque is religious and philosophical (a Christian-Stoic reminder of transience), the Victorian social and courtly (the obligatory code of court mourning).

What are the most important Baroque memento mori pieces?

Four principal forms. The skull ring - a gold ring with an enamelled or carved skull as its main motif, often with a Latin inscription. The skeleton pendant - a small gold figure of a standing or reclining skeleton, frequently hinged to open onto a hidden interior. The memento mori locket - a locket with an enamelled skull motif on the front and a memorial image or inscription within. The Stuart mourning ring - the English speciality with a table-cut diamond set over a black enamel skull on a white ground.

Did Baroque mourning jewellery always refer to a particular deceased person?

No, and this is an important difference from later mourning jewellery. Baroque memento mori pieces were often generic - they admonished the wearer about their own mortality without commemorating any specific person. Only in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century did they become increasingly individualised, with names, dates of death and biographical references. This individualisation is the transition from memento mori to mourning jewellery.

Are Baroque memento mori pieces still made today?

In a small niche, yes. Workshops in England and the German-speaking countries produce historicising memento mori pieces - usually as a deliberately antiquarian gesture, often in a Goth or dark-academia idiom. In the mainstream memorial-jewellery market they play no part. The iconographic tradition (skull, scythe, hourglass) lives on in tattoo culture and in a few jewellery subcultures.

Baroque (c. 1600–1750)

The Baroque is the mourning-jewellery epoch of drastic memento mori imagery: skull rings, skeleton pendants, hourglasses, scythes and inscriptions such as Hodie mihi, cras tibi define a mourning jewellery that does not euphemise death but makes it visible as a constant, almost gladly displayed admonition.

Deutsch