Memento mori
Memento mori is the Christian-Stoic exhortation to be mindful of one's own death - and at the same time the iconographic soil from which European mourning jewellery of the 17th century grew.
Written by Dr. Helene Vasall
Before any mourning jewellery there stood the memento mori - the admonition to be mindful of one's own death. Without this antecedent, religiously grounded practice, the 17th century would have produced no type of jewellery that made death its subject. The later mourning jewellery is a secularisation of memento mori jewellery; today's memorial jewellery a further attenuation - what began as a religious duty is today an act of personal attachment.
What memento mori means
The formula is a condensation of two currents. From the Christian monastic tradition comes the daily remembrance of the novissima - death, judgement, heaven, hell. From Stoic philosophy comes the ideal of living rightly in the awareness of mortality (Seneca, Epistulae 12.8: omnis dies, omnis hora quam nihil sumus ostendit). The two lines converge in the late Middle Ages and, from around 1500, give rise to a visual grammar of their own: skull, hourglass, worms, winged death, vanitas still life.
The admonition is not meant morbidly. It is preparatory: whoever keeps death daily before their eyes should make better decisions, live more honestly, seek reconciliation. In the Baroque it is an everyday presence - on cups, in books of hours, on gravestones and, indeed, in jewellery.
Memento mori jewellery in the 17th century
The heyday of memento mori jewellery coincides with the Baroque: roughly 1600 to 1750. Three carrier genres are documented:
Memento mori rings. Gold rings with enamelled skulls, sometimes with a hinged skull over a small bone chamber, almost always with an inscription. The most famous pieces come from England and the Netherlands. They were not expensive - a gold base and enamel - and correspondingly widespread (see Mourning Ring (Memorial Ring)).
Pendants with vanitas motifs. Small plaques with skulls barely the size of a hand, often with Hodie mihi cras tibi beneath them. Some carry a tiny lover's eye on the reverse - in this era the linking of love and death is taken for granted (see Lovers' Eye).
Posy rings with a memento inscription. A special form: narrow gold rings with the inscription engraved on the inside, often as a secret motto between two people - Memento finis instead of a verse of love. The inscription is visible only as the ring is put on (see Posy Ring).
These pieces are rarely bequests from the deceased - unlike the later mourning rings. They are self-admonishing: one buys them for oneself, not for others.
Iconography
The pictorial vocabulary is comparatively small and very stable:
- Skull - the strongest and most frequent single motif. Frontal, en face, often with two crossed bones. In some variants it grins; in Puritan contexts it is grave (see Skull (the Memento Mori Death's Head)).
- Hourglass - passing time. Frequently winged, sometimes with two scythes. It rarely stands alone, almost always in combination with a skull or an inscription (see Hourglass).
- Snake biting its own tail (ouroboros) - eternity, the closed circle of a life. In the 19th century one of the few memento mori images to survive into the Victorian repertoire (see Serpent (Ouroboros)).
- Worms and clouds - decay. Rather rare in jewellery, more frequent in vanitas still life.
- Angel with a trumpet - the Last Judgement. From the 18th century onward it softens into the cherub figure (see Angels and Putti).
What is added after 1800 - urn, weeping willow, forget-me-not - strictly speaking no longer belongs to memento mori but to sentimental jewellery and later to mourning jewellery.
The transition into the 18th century
With the Enlightenment the admonition weakens. Three shifts can be traced in the jewellery:
- Personalisation. Instead of generic memento mori symbolism, concrete references to persons come to the fore: initials, date of death, locks of hair.
- Sentimentalisation. Mourning becomes a tender, tearful act; sepia miniatures with mourning figures, urns and willows replace skulls (see Sepia Hair Painting).
- Secularisation. The ultimate religious reference (judgement, resurrection) recedes; what remains is secular remembrance. The jewellery moves from memento mori to memoria amici - from admonition to remembrance.
Taken together, these three shifts yield the classical mourning jewellery of the 19th century as we know it from the Victorian holdings.
Memento mori today
In classical memorial jewellery the memento mori vocabulary scarcely appears any more. Anyone having a piece made for a deceased person wants no skulls - but a fingerprint, an inscription, a lock of hair. Memento mori survives in three niches:
- Conceptual jewellery - goldsmiths with an artistic agenda take up vanitas motifs, frequently ironically.
- Subcultures - goth, the tattoo scene, heavy metal aesthetics. Here the skull is not religious but a badge of identity.
- The collectors' market - historical memento mori rings fetch top prices at auction; they are the most expensive mourning jewellery pieces of all.
In broad jewellery practice, memento mori has gone from presentable to specialised. What has held is its underlying gesture: a piece that does not repress death but integrates it into daily wear.
Where memento mori leads on
Anyone wanting to follow the thread into actual mourning practice should jump into the clusters linked below - above all into Sentimental Jewellery (the historical transition) and Mourning Jewellery (the Victorian heyday).
Themes surrounding this term
This pillar page draws the wider arc - the clusters below lead into material, form, symbolism and modern practice.
Core concepts
4- Memorial JewelleryMemorial jewellery is jewellery that deliberately binds itself to one particular person - through an inscription, a photograph, hair, ashes or, the defining medium today, a digitally captured fingerprint.
- Mourning JewelleryMourning jewellery is body adornment that signals a death, binds the memory of a deceased person, or does both at once - since the 17th century a jewellery type in its own right, with a material language of its own.
- Sentimental JewellerySentimental jewellery is the jewellery of the age of sensibility between 1760 and 1840 - pieces in which love, friendship and grief share the same imagery, and in which hair, miniature painting and personal inscriptions first become the load-bearing form.
- Widow's JewelleryWidow's jewellery is the graduated mourning jewellery worn by widows in the 19th century according to a strictly codified plan of court mourning - from deep matte black to half-mourning lilac, each phase with its own materials and its own formal language.
Periods
7- Art DecoArt Deco (1920–1939) is the first jewellery epoch without a ritualised canon of mourning - shaped by geometric rigour, machine aesthetics and a decisive rejection of the sentimental mourning fashions of the nineteenth century; memorial jewellery becomes private, understated and formally absorbed into the general jewellery line rather than set apart as its own genre.
- 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.
- Biedermeier (1815–1848)Biedermeier is the German-speaking mourning-jewellery epoch between the Congress of Vienna and the revolution of 1848 - a bourgeois, introverted period of forget-me-nots, Berlin iron and hairwork mosaic, with an understanding of mourning jewellery oriented more towards the family and the private sphere than towards the court.
- Jugendstil (Art Nouveau)Jugendstil, or Art Nouveau (1890–1910), is the last jewellery epoch with a mourning symbolism of its own before the rupture of the First World War - defined by floral, organically curving forms, mystical symbolism and a tendency to soften the strict Victorian mourning codes into a poetic, naturalistic language of remembrance.
- The Edwardian Era (1901–1910/1914)The Edwardian era is the brief transitional period between the Victorian system of mourning jewellery and its final collapse in the First World War - a time of loosening codes, of refinement in materials (platinum, diamond) and of the first decided *weakening* of formal mourning obligation.
- The Georgian Era (1714–1837)The Georgian era spans the reigns of the four kings George I to George IV and of William IV in Britain. In mourning jewellery it is the epoch in which sentimental jewellery was invented - sepia hair painting, the lover's eye, the miniature portrait on ivory, and the posy ring in transition to the memento mori ring.
- The Victorian Era (1837–1901)The Victorian era is the heyday of mourning jewellery - a period of more than sixty years in which court mourning codes, industrial mass production, new materials (jet, vulcanite, Berlin iron) and Queen Victoria's personal widowhood combined to produce a system of public and private mourning visibility without precedent in European history.
Materials
15- AmberAmber - fossilised tree resin, above all from the Baltic region - was worked in the 19th century as a light brown or reddish alternative to black Whitby jet and is today the bearer of its own East-Central and Eastern European mourning jewellery tradition, with casting-in techniques for modern memorial substances.
- Berlin IronBerlin iron is cast, black-burnished iron jewellery of Prussian manufacture - created in the context of the Wars of Liberation of 1813 and, over the following decades, become an emblem of patriotic mourning culture.
- Black Enamel (Schwarzemail)Black enamel is a glass frit coloured with manganese oxide and fused in thin layers onto gold or silver - the most expensive variant of Victorian mourning jewellery and the preferred carrier ground for inscriptions.
- Bog OakBog oak is oak timber preserved for thousands of years in raised bog, which turns deep black through interaction with humic acids and which in the 19th century became, above all in Ireland, a vernacular, inexpensive material for mourning jewellery - a patriotically charged counterpart to English Whitby jet.
- French JetFrench jet is a misnomer - not jet at all, but deep black pressed glass which, from the 1860s onwards, conquered the Victorian widow's-mourning-jewellery segment as inexpensive mass-produced ware.
- Garnet (Mourning Garnet)The garnet - above all the dark red pyrope from Bohemia - was in the 19th century the most important red gemstone material of mourning and half-mourning jewellery, above all in the Central European region, with Bohemian garnet jewellery as a jewellery tradition in its own right, peaking in the second half of the century.
- Gold in Mourning JewelleryGold is historically the most dominant carrier material of mourning and memorial jewellery - usually in muted alloys, often contrasted with black enamel or as a restrained gold setting around a dark principal material such as jet, onyx or a plait of hair.
- Horsehair (Crin de Cheval)Horsehair - above all from the manes and tails of slaughtered horses - was in the 18th and 19th centuries an important material for woven and plaited mourning jewellery elements, used by French *cheveliers* and Swedish workshops to imitate and supplement the more expensive hairwork.
- IvoryFrom the 17th to the 19th century ivory was an important material for memento mori carvings, carved mourning pendants and miniature portraits in pendant mounts - today its use is strictly regulated worldwide by the CITES convention on the protection of species, and the market is shifting to historical pieces and substitute materials such as mammoth ivory or tagua nut.
- Jet (Gagate)Jet - German *Gagat* - is a fossil, deep-black material formed from petrified wood which in the nineteenth century became the very epitome of Victorian mourning jewellery.
- OnyxOnyx is a black variety of chalcedony which, in Victorian mourning jewellery of the second stage of mourning, formed the lustrous, polished counterpart to matt jet.
- Silver in Mourning JewelleryIn the 19th century silver was the popular mourning carrier material of the bourgeois middle class and is today the most widespread material of modern memorial jewellery - cheaper than gold, more precise to engrave than stainless steel and with a long symbolic tradition as a material of purity and of memento mori iconography.
- The Pearl in Mourning JewelleryThe pearl is the most important white material in the mourning context - symbol of the tear, of purity and of innocence - and in the 19th century was the preferred gemstone substance above all in half-mourning and final mourning as well as in mourning jewellery for deceased children.
- Vulcanite (Ebonite)Vulcanite is hardened, black-dyed natural rubber - an industrial invention of the 1840s which found wide use in Victorian mourning jewellery as an inexpensive alternative to jet.
- Whitby JetWhitby jet is jet from the North English coastal town of Whitby - by far the most important deposit worldwide in the 19th century and the gold standard of Victorian mourning jewellery.
Jewellery forms
14- Ash PendantThe ash pendant is a modern remembrance pendant with a tightly sealed hollow setting that holds a small quantity of a deceased person's ashes - today the fastest-growing jewellery form in the modern mourning and remembrance market.
- Fingerprint PendantA fingerprint pendant carries the line pattern of a fingerprint, milled or laser-engraved into gold, silver or platinum - today the defining form of modern remembrance jewellery and the technical successor format to the Victorian mourning locket.
- Funerary JewelleryFunerary jewellery is jewellery placed with a deceased person at burial or worn by the bereaved on the day of the funeral - an umbrella term covering very different forms with a tradition thousands of years old and a modern redefinition as a personalised keepsake.
- Mourning BraceletThe mourning bracelet is a remembrance piece worn at the wrist which became popular in the nineteenth century as plaited hairwork or as a jet link bracelet, and which lives on today as a leather bracelet with a relic setting or a fine gold bracelet with a remembrance element.
- Mourning BroochThe mourning brooch is the central women's jewellery form of Victorian mourning wear - a brooch, often the size of a palm, pinned to dress, collar or veil, and today an almost exclusively historical field of collecting.
- Mourning CuffA mourning cuff is a broad bangle worn at the wrist, established in the nineteenth century as a formal mourning accessory of the English and American upper class, and living on today as a wide bracelet with a relic setting or an inscription panel.
- Mourning CufflinksMourning cufflinks are discreet, soberly mounted cufflinks in black, onyx or matt gold which belonged in the nineteenth century to a gentleman's formal mourning toilette, and which live on today as a personalised remembrance set with an inscription, symbol or fingerprint.
- Mourning EarringsMourning earrings are matt black or muted pieces of ear jewellery which in the nineteenth century were an obligatory component of the female mourning toilette, and which live on today as a discreet remembrance variant with a tiny relic setting.
- Mourning LocketThe mourning locket is a pendant worn on a neck chain with an interior compartment - a concealed carrier of hair, photograph or inscription that keeps the memento close to the body and has been, from the eighteenth century to the present, the most important private form of mourning jewellery.
- Mourning NecklaceThe mourning necklace is a chain worn at the neck in black or muted material which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, became the standard daytime wear of the mourning period, and which lives on today as a reduced remembrance variant with a pendant.
- Mourning Ring (Memorial Ring)A mourning ring - also called a memorial ring - is a finger ring that carries the memory of a deceased person, usually in the form of an inscription, an image, a lock of hair or a fingerprint.
- Mourning StickpinThe mourning stickpin is a small pin worn on the lapel or at the knot of a tie which belonged in the nineteenth century to a gentleman's formal mourning toilette - today a discreet remembrance lapel pin with a symbol, initials or a fingerprint element.
- Posy RingA posy ring is a gold ring, in use from the late Middle Ages into the eighteenth century, bearing an inscription engraved on its inner face - a relic in words, worn directly on the finger as a promise of love, friendship or remembrance.
- Reliquary PendantThe reliquary pendant is the religious ancestor of the remembrance locket - a pendant worn at the neck with an interior compartment that originally held the relics of saints and, from the seventeenth century onwards, was secularised into a keepsake of deceased family members.
Symbols & motifs
13- AnchorIn mourning and memorial jewellery the anchor is the classic symbol of *hope* - usually paired with the cross (faith) and the heart (love) as a threefold emblem of the virtues; a constant form in Victorian jewellery, and living on in modern memorial jewellery as a many-layered symbol of steadiness, anchorage and constancy.
- Angels and PuttiIn mourning jewellery, angels and putti form the iconographic bridge between death and redemption - the angel as the soul's companion into the hereafter, the putto as an image of the innocent child's soul. Both motifs are widespread in sentimental and Victorian mourning jewellery, above all in the context of mourning for children.
- ButterflyThe butterfly is the most important modern secular symbol of mourning - an ancient mythological metaphor for the soul (Greek *psyché* means both "butterfly" and "soul") that was marginal in the nineteenth century and has, since the late twentieth, become the dominant alternative symbol of remembrance alongside cross and heart.
- CrossThe cross is the most formative Christian symbol of mourning and remembrance - from the medieval reliquary cross via the Victorian jet cross to the modern memorial pendant; in all its formal variety (Latin cross, Celtic cross, patriarchal cross, cross patté) it always points to death, redemption and resurrection.
- Forget-me-notThe forget-me-not is the German-speaking world's symbol of mourning and remembrance par excellence - a small blue meadow flower whose very name becomes a plea to be remembered, and which has shaped bourgeois mourning jewellery since the Biedermeier.
- Hand with Flower (*Dexiosis* and the Flower Gesture)The hand with flower - a hand emerging from a sleeve, holding a bouquet, a single blossom or a posy of forget-me-nots - is a central sentimental and mourning cipher of Georgian and Biedermeier jewellery, often carrying the sense of being *reached out from the grave* or of a *last greeting of love*.
- HeartThe heart is the third element of the Christian triad of virtues (faith - hope - love) and at the same time the strongest secular symbol of love and affection in mourning and memorial jewellery - from the medieval Sacred Heart via the Georgian heart locket to the modern ash pendant in the shape of a heart.
- HourglassThe hourglass is one of the oldest and most potent memento mori symbols - sand run through as an image of the passing of a lifetime, often given wings (*tempus fugit*, "time flies") and a standard cipher on mourning jewellery from the Baroque into the early nineteenth century.
- Serpent (Ouroboros)The serpent biting its own tail - the ouroboros - is one of the few Baroque memento mori symbols to survive the passage into the Victorian age: an image of eternity that was reinterpreted in the nineteenth century from admonition into a gesture of hope.
- Skull (the Memento Mori Death's Head)The skull is the sharpest and oldest memento mori symbol - a direct iconographic reminder of mortality and transience that became the dominant jewellery form in the Baroque and, after a long bourgeois interval, is present again today in modern memorial and fashion symbolism.
- TearThe tear - as a shaped teardrop pendant, as a drop-shaped pearl or as a painted tear on a miniature portrait - is one of the most direct mourning symbols of all; it joins bodily reality (the drop actually wept) to symbolic condensation, and appears in jewellery from the Baroque memento mori to the modern teardrop ash pendant.
- UrnThe urn is the longest-lived mourning symbol of the European jewellery tradition - an antiquising vessel form that, since the late eighteenth century, has represented the ashes and thus, metonymically, the deceased person themselves.
- Weeping WillowThe weeping willow is the most formative botanical mourning symbol of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - born in the English landscape garden of the Enlightenment, adopted by sentimentalism as an image of silent sorrow, and become in Victorian mourning iconography the dominant mourning scene on pendants, miniatures and grave stelae.
Techniques & craft
12- Celluloid (Mourning-Jewellery Imitation)Celluloid is the first industrially produced plastic in history (1869) and became, in the late nineteenth century, the cheap imitation of jet, ivory and amber in the mass mourning jewellery of the late Victorian middle and working classes - the first “democratisation” of mourning jewellery and, at the same time, the beginning of the decline of the noble mourning materials.
- Engraving and InscriptionsEngraving is the oldest personalisation technique in memorial jewellery - from the Baroque memento mori ring to modern laser micro-engraving, which today inscribes initials, dates of death and even photographed handwriting into metal.
- GuillochéGuilloché is a mechanical engraving technique in which overlapping geometric line patterns (waves, spirals, hatchings) are cut into metal - usually as a ground for translucent enamel. A classic jewellery technique since the eighteenth century, it shapes high-quality mourning and sentimental lockets.
- HairworkHairwork is the collective term for all techniques in which human hair becomes the carrier material of a piece of jewellery - from a single lock beneath rock crystal to finely plaited hair weaving in the Victorian showpiece manner.
- Laser EngravingLaser engraving is the most important modern engraving technique in memorial jewellery: a focused laser beam removes material from the jewellery surface with precision and leaves a permanent mark accurate to a fraction of a millimetre - for names, dates of death, handwriting, fingerprint lines or QR codes.
- Lovers' EyeA lover's eye is a painted miniature of an eye on ivory, set into a brooch or pendant - an English special form of sentimental jewellery in which the identifying face is absent and only the eye remains.
- Micromosaic (Micromosaico)The micromosaic is a mosaic technique perfected in Rome and Venice, in which tiny glass tesserae (often smaller than 1 mm) are assembled into detailed miniature pictures - in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a high-grade material for mourning and souvenir pendants bearing neoclassical mourning scenes, weeping willows, urns or memorial inscriptions.
- Miniature Painting on IvoryMiniature painting on ivory was the leading technique of personal portrait jewellery in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the finest watercolour work on ivory plaques 1 to 5 cm across, set in gold mounts and worn as a pendant, brooch or bracelet.
- Niello (Black Inlay Technique)Niello is an ancient jewellery-finishing technique in which engraved lines on silver or gold are filled with a black sulphur-metal alloy - the result is a deep dark line drawing on a light ground, used in memento mori jewellery and in Victorian mourning jewellery as a cheaper alternative to black enamel.
- Pinchbeck (Gold-Imitation Alloy)Pinchbeck is a copper-zinc alloy of the early eighteenth century, developed by the London clockmaker Christopher Pinchbeck - deceptively similar to gold in appearance, considerably cheaper, and in Georgian sentimental jewellery the dominant material of middle-class mourning and memorial pieces.
- Sepia Hair PaintingSepia hair painting combines two sentimental techniques: chopped human hair is worked with sepia ink into a pigment mixture and used as the medium for tiny mourning miniatures set beneath rock crystal.
- Stuart CrystalStuart crystal is an English memento mori jewellery technique of the late seventeenth century: a flat rock-crystal cabochon is set over a miniature painting with a memento mori motif (skull, initials, date of death) - the technique dominated English mourning jewellery of the Stuart and early Hanoverian periods.
People & cultural history
8- George IV (1762–1830)George IV, Prince Regent from 1811 and King of England from 1820 to 1830, was a pronounced lover of sentimental jewellery and as such shaped the transitional phase in jewellery history between the Georgian and the Victorian mourning traditions - the lover's-eye fashion in particular is directly connected to his personal commission of 1785.
- Mourning Rituals in the German-Speaking WorldGerman-speaking mourning rituals differ perceptibly from the English court-mourning tradition - shaped by confessional division (Catholic / Protestant), middle-class sensibility, Biedermeier domesticity and an independent culture of memorial jewellery which carried different emphases in Vienna, Berlin and Munich according to region.
- Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819–1861)Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, was in his lifetime a central cultural and political figure of the English court - his early death on 14 December 1861 set off his wife's forty years of widow's mourning and thereby shaped the whole Victorian mourning-jewellery system more lastingly than any other single death of the nineteenth century.
- Queen Victoria (1819–1901)Queen Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom from 1837 to 1901, became through her forty years of widow's mourning after the death of Prince Albert (1861) the central style-setting figure of the Victorian mourning-jewellery system - her personal practice of mourning shaped an entire age of European mourning culture.
- The Berlin Iron ManufactoriesThe Prussian royal iron foundries in Berlin, Gleiwitz and Sayn made fine jewellery of blackened cast iron between 1804 and around 1870 - at first as a patriotic exchange material during the Wars of Liberation (*Gold gab ich für Eisen*, "I gave gold for iron"), later as an established mourning and memorial line of the Biedermeier period.
- The Middle Classes and Mourning Jewellery in the Nineteenth CenturyThe rising middle classes of the nineteenth century were the principal bearers and principal consumers of the era's mourning and memorial jewellery - a social stratum that took over the aristocratic model of court mourning, gave it symbols and materials of its own, and in the course of industrialisation turned it into a mass market.
- Tudor Mourning and Stuart Bequest RingsThe Tudor and Stuart era in England (1485–1714) is the birth period of the modern mourning-jewellery system - from the memento mori ring of Henry VIII's day, through the *funeral ring* bequests of the Elizabethan aristocracy, to the Stuart mourning ring following the execution of Charles I (1649) and the death of Charles II (1685).
- Whitby - Jet Workshops on the Yorkshire CoastWhitby is the small harbour town on the north-east English Yorkshire coast whose jet deposits and workshops supplied the Victorian mourning-jewellery system with its most important material foundation in the nineteenth century - at the peak around 1870, more than 1,500 cutters and carvers there worked for the global mourning market.
Modern memorial jewellery
11- 3D Printing and Memorial ObjectsIn modern memorial culture, 3D printing (additive manufacturing) allows unique bodily traces to be reproduced directly - fingerprints, handprints, face casts, footprints - as a piece of jewellery or a memorial object; since around 2010 the technology has transformed the production of personalised memorial jewellery.
- Ash JewelleryAsh jewellery is a modern memorial piece in which a small quantity of cremation ashes is permanently enclosed - usually in a hollow setting with a rock-crystal window, or embedded in synthetic resin.
- Digital Remembrance (QR Code, NFC, AR)Digital remembrance links a classical memorial object (a piece of jewellery, a headstone, an urn) to content retrievable digitally - typically via a QR code, an NFC chip or an augmented-reality marker. Across that bridge, photographs, videos, texts and voice messages of the person who has died can be made permanently accessible.
- Fingerprint JewelleryFingerprint jewellery carries the individual ridge pattern of a specific person - as a fine laser engraving, in relief or set beneath a cabochon - and so turns a biometric feature into a deeply personal memorial motif.
- Hair Pendant (Modern Memorial Jewellery)The modern hair pendant carries a lock of the person remembered in a tightly sealed hollow setting at the throat - the direct technical continuation of the Victorian hairwork tradition, today made with modern workshop techniques and usually combined with a laser engraving or inscription on the outer face.
- Memorial DiamondThe memorial diamond is a synthetically grown diamond cultivated from the carbon of cremation ashes or a lock of the deceased person's hair - the most technically demanding and most durable keepsake of the present day.
- Memorial Glass (Ashes in Glass)In memorial glass, a small quantity of the deceased person's ashes is worked into molten glass and formed into a memorial object - typically a pendant, bead, marble, sculpture or vase. Within the transparent or coloured glass the ashes form characteristic cloud, bubble or star patterns, making the link to the person remembered visible.
- Memorial Jewellery for Stillbirth and Infant LossJewellery for stillbirth and infant loss is memorial jewellery for children who died before, during or shortly after birth. It works with the often very limited bodily traces (footprint, lock of hair, handprint) and forms a distinct and especially sensitive field.
- Memorial TattooThe memorial tattoo is an inscription in the skin in memory of a person who has died; one particular variant is the *ash tattoo* or *morbid ink tattoo*, in which a small quantity of the deceased person's sterilised ashes is mixed into the tattoo pigment - a modern form of remembrance carried on the body itself, outside the classical jewellery tradition.
- Personalisation Through Engraving (Handwriting, Initials, Dates)Modern laser engraving ties a piece of jewellery precisely to one particular person - through initials, dates of death, photographed handwriting or fingerprint ridges - and is today the most common personalisation technique in memorial jewellery.
- Pet Memorial JewelleryPet memorial jewellery transfers the personalisation techniques of human memorial jewellery to dogs, cats, horses and other companion animals - paw print, whisker, lock of fur or ashes as the link to an animal that has died.
Practice & law
5- Burial Laws and the Ashes of the Deceased (Germany, Austria, Switzerland)In Germany, ashes are largely subject to mandatory cemetery burial (*Friedhofszwang*); in Austria practice is more liberal and varies by state; in Switzerland it is largely unrestricted. This has concrete consequences for ash jewellery and memorial diamonds; the legal position is country-specific and still changing.
- Friedhofszwang - Mandatory Cemetery Burial (Germany)*Friedhofszwang* is the duty, in force in Germany, to bury mortal remains - including ashes from a cremation - only in an approved cemetery or in a state-approved alternative form of burial. It sets the legal limits on what is possible with ashes in the context of mourning and memorial jewellery.
- Grief Timeline - Jewellery and Memorial PiecesWhen does which step in the grieving process make sense - from the immediate loss, through the funeral, to later memorial projects? This guide sets out the typical grief timeline as it relates to decisions about jewellery and remembrance, and helps you find the right moment for each form of memorial piece.
- Inheriting Jewellery - A Practical GuideJewellery is among the most emotionally charged of all inherited possessions - and at the same time one of the most frequent sources of conflict among co-heirs. This guide covers the key legal, practical and personal questions around inheriting jewellery under German law, with particular reference to mourning and memorial pieces.
- Keeping Cremation Ashes - A Practical GuideAnyone wishing to keep a deceased person's ashes for memorial jewellery, a memorial tattoo or another personal form of remembrance faces legal, practical and ethical questions. This guide explains the typical steps, the quantities involved, the available storage options and the pitfalls to watch for.
Questions about this entry
- Is memento mori jewellery the same thing as mourning jewellery?
No. Memento mori jewellery admonishes the wearer about their own dying - it is religiously or philosophically motivated. Mourning jewellery in the narrower sense refers to the specific death of another person. In the 17th century the two overlap strongly; from the 19th century onward they part ways.
- Why do skulls almost entirely disappear after 1800?
With the Enlightenment and the age of sensibility, the memento mori vocabulary comes to be seen as too drastic. The urn takes the place of the skull, the weeping willow the place of the hourglass. The imagery grows gentler; the admonition recedes and remembrance moves to the fore.
- Are memento mori pieces still made today?
Yes, above all in conceptual jewellery and in subcultures (goth, tattoo-adjacent milieus). The skull remains the strongest single motif. In classical memorial jewellery it hardly ever appears.
- Which inscriptions are typical?
Memento mori, Hodie mihi cras tibi ("today me, tomorrow you"), Memento finis, Respice finem ("consider the end"), and in English Prepare to die. From 1700 onward they are increasingly replaced by personal inscriptions (initials, date of death).
- What are 'vanitas rings'?
A subgroup of memento mori rings from the 16th and 17th centuries. They often show a skull between two cherub heads, or a winged hourglass - symbols of passing time that at the same time convey the hope of resurrection.
Further reading
- Memento Mori: The Dead Among Us - Paul Koudounaris (2015)
- Death and the Image - Memento Mori in Early Modern Europe - John R. Decker (2019)
- The Mourning Ring - V&A Collection Notes
- Vanitas - Stilleben des Todes - Ingvar Bergström (1956)
Related entries
- Core conceptsMourning Jewellery
Mourning jewellery is body adornment that signals a death, binds the memory of a deceased person, or does both at once - since the 17th century a jewellery type in its own right, with a material language of its own.
- Core conceptsMemorial Jewellery
Memorial jewellery is jewellery that deliberately binds itself to one particular person - through an inscription, a photograph, hair, ashes or, the defining medium today, a digitally captured fingerprint.
- Core conceptsSentimental Jewellery
Sentimental jewellery is the jewellery of the age of sensibility between 1760 and 1840 - pieces in which love, friendship and grief share the same imagery, and in which hair, miniature painting and personal inscriptions first become the load-bearing form.
- Core conceptsWidow's Jewellery
Widow's jewellery is the graduated mourning jewellery worn by widows in the 19th century according to a strictly codified plan of court mourning - from deep matte black to half-mourning lilac, each phase with its own materials and its own formal language.
- PeriodsThe Georgian Era (1714–1837)
The Georgian era spans the reigns of the four kings George I to George IV and of William IV in Britain. In mourning jewellery it is the epoch in which sentimental jewellery was invented - sepia hair painting, the lover's eye, the miniature portrait on ivory, and the posy ring in transition to the memento mori ring.
- Jewellery formsMourning Ring (Memorial Ring)
A mourning ring - also called a memorial ring - is a finger ring that carries the memory of a deceased person, usually in the form of an inscription, an image, a lock of hair or a fingerprint.
- Jewellery formsPosy Ring
A posy ring is a gold ring, in use from the late Middle Ages into the eighteenth century, bearing an inscription engraved on its inner face - a relic in words, worn directly on the finger as a promise of love, friendship or remembrance.
- Symbols & motifsSkull (the Memento Mori Death's Head)
The skull is the sharpest and oldest memento mori symbol - a direct iconographic reminder of mortality and transience that became the dominant jewellery form in the Baroque and, after a long bourgeois interval, is present again today in modern memorial and fashion symbolism.
- Symbols & motifsHourglass
The hourglass is one of the oldest and most potent memento mori symbols - sand run through as an image of the passing of a lifetime, often given wings (*tempus fugit*, "time flies") and a standard cipher on mourning jewellery from the Baroque into the early nineteenth century.
- Symbols & motifsSerpent (Ouroboros)
The serpent biting its own tail - the ouroboros - is one of the few Baroque memento mori symbols to survive the passage into the Victorian age: an image of eternity that was reinterpreted in the nineteenth century from admonition into a gesture of hope.
- Symbols & motifsAngels and Putti
In mourning jewellery, angels and putti form the iconographic bridge between death and redemption - the angel as the soul's companion into the hereafter, the putto as an image of the innocent child's soul. Both motifs are widespread in sentimental and Victorian mourning jewellery, above all in the context of mourning for children.
- Techniques & craftEngraving and Inscriptions
Engraving is the oldest personalisation technique in memorial jewellery - from the Baroque memento mori ring to modern laser micro-engraving, which today inscribes initials, dates of death and even photographed handwriting into metal.
- Techniques & craftNiello (Black Inlay Technique)
Niello is an ancient jewellery-finishing technique in which engraved lines on silver or gold are filled with a black sulphur-metal alloy - the result is a deep dark line drawing on a light ground, used in memento mori jewellery and in Victorian mourning jewellery as a cheaper alternative to black enamel.
- People & cultural historyMourning Rituals in the German-Speaking World
German-speaking mourning rituals differ perceptibly from the English court-mourning tradition - shaped by confessional division (Catholic / Protestant), middle-class sensibility, Biedermeier domesticity and an independent culture of memorial jewellery which carried different emphases in Vienna, Berlin and Munich according to region.