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.

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.

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