Hourglass

The hourglass is one of the oldest and culturally most stable memento mori symbols. From the late Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century it was a central cipher of Baroque iconography on transience - present in vanitas still lifes, on gravestones, in religious printed works and in memento mori jewellery. In Victorian mourning jewellery it loses importance; urn and weeping willow take its place as the dominant mourning symbols. But as a deeper historical stratum of mourning iconography it remains an important reference.

Symbolic meaning

The hourglass carries four layers of meaning:

The passing of a lifetime. The trickling sand shows the unstoppable, continuous movement of time. Each grain of sand is a moment - the upper chamber empties, the lower fills. The image is measurable (one sees time passing), inescapable (one cannot hold the sand back) and finite (at some point the upper chamber is empty).

The finitude of life. The hourglass is finite. When all the sand has run through, time is at an end - an image of death. Unlike clocks with hands, which run in a circle and thus suggest unlimited repetition, the hourglass is a single process. It is therefore especially well suited as an image of the finite human life.

Acceleration in the middle. Observers often notice that the sand flows faster towards the middle (because the remaining quantity in the upper chamber decreases and the aperture becomes freer). This acceleration - a technical property of hourglass construction - is read allegorically as the acceleration of one's lifetime in old age.

The winged hourglass as tempus fugit. Adding wings (often eagle's or angel's wings) intensifies the movement. Tempus fugit - "time flies" - becomes the standard iconographic formula. The winged hourglass is the most densely condensed form of Baroque symbolism on transience.

Historical forerunners

The hourglass as a technical device is attested in Europe from the eighth century. As a religious and allegorical symbol it spreads from the late Middle Ages onwards:

• Late medieval depictions of the dance of death frequently show Death with an hourglass in hand
• Renaissance still lifes incorporate the hourglass as a vanitas element
• Baroque vanitas painting makes it a standard cipher (Pieter Claesz, Harmen Steenwijck, Philippe de Champaigne)
• Memento mori books and prints of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show it on title pages and frontispieces

The hourglass is thus one of the most broadly anchored ciphers of transience in European culture. Its diffusion into jewellery follows that wider iconographic tradition.

The hourglass in jewellery

In jewellery the hourglass appears in several variants:

As the central motif. Rarely - few pieces show the hourglass without an accompanying element. Isolated examples are found in Baroque memento mori rings with an enamelled hourglass relief.

As an accompanying element to the skull. The most frequent variant. On skull rings, skull brooches and memento mori lockets the hourglass appears beside the skull - the skull as the principal motif (death), the hourglass as a supplementary cipher (passing time) (see Skull (the Memento Mori Death's Head)).

In combination with the scythe. The scythe as death's tool, the hourglass as death's indicator. This combination is found on Baroque skeleton pendants, vanitas pieces and allegorical reliefs.

Winged, with an inscription. The most iconically compressed form. A winged hourglass with a surrounding inscription Tempus fugit or Hora ruit. Above all in Stuart mourning rings and in English memento mori pieces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

As an accompanying element to a skeleton. In modelled skeleton pendants (above all Tudor and Stuart pieces) the skeleton often holds a tiny hourglass in one hand. Here the hourglass is a small sculptural detail within a larger skeleton composition.

In bequest inscriptions. On bequest rings (see Tudor Mourning and Stuart Bequest Rings) the hourglass occasionally appears as a symbol accompanying the inscription - usually beside the date of death, as an image of a life run out.

Execution in materials

The hourglass is rendered in jewellery in several techniques:

• Black enamel relief on gold - the most frequent variant; the hourglass is executed as a painted image on a white or gold enamel ground
• Engraved line drawing - a plainer variant; above all on the inner faces of rings and pendants
• Modelled gold relief - the most elaborate variant; the hourglass is executed as a small three-dimensional gold element, often with a movable body of sand
• Enamel mosaic with gold lines - mixed technique; the contours of the hourglass in gold, the inner surfaces in enamel inlay

In especially elaborate pieces a working miniature hourglass was occasionally integrated into the jewel - a tiny glass vessel with real sand inside that actually trickles when the piece is turned. Such mechanical variants are rare and count as special collectors' pieces.

Decline in Victorian mourning jewellery

In Victorian mourning jewellery the hourglass loses its dominant position. Three reasons:

A shift in the logic of mourning. In the Victorian period mourning is no longer primarily memento mori (one's own mortality) but mourning jewellery (remembrance of a particular deceased person). The hourglass - a symbol of transience in general - fits concrete individual mourning less well than the urn or the weeping willow.

Reduction to material. Victorian mourning jewellery aesthetics tend towards the pure matt-black material surface (jet, vulcanite). Fine iconographic elements such as an hourglass are difficult to render on such materials; iconography is reduced to the material itself.

Competition from new symbols. In Victorian mourning jewellery the anchor (hope) and the forget-me-not (remembrance) join in as positive mourning symbols. The older memento mori visual language, with its dense hourglass-scythe-skull composition, seems too drastic and old-fashioned in a Victorian context.

In Victorian mourning pieces the hourglass appears only sporadically - usually as a deliberately historicising gesture in especially elaborate bequest pieces or in mourning jewellery lines of Catholic religious orientation.

Collectors' market and scholarship

Memento mori pieces with an hourglass element form an established sub-category for collectors. At auction they usually achieve solid prices without reaching the top tier (unlike Tudor and Stuart mourning rings with a skull element, which can reach spectacular sums). Typical price ranges:

• Simple memento mori pendants with an hourglass element: 800 to 3,000 €
• Baroque skeleton pendants with an integrated hourglass: 3,000 to 15,000 €
• Vanitas brooches with an hourglass composition: 2,000 to 10,000 €
• Stuart mourning rings with an hourglass inscription border: 5,000 to 25,000 €

The most important collections are in the British Museum (more than 50 pieces with an hourglass element), the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence.

The hourglass in modern memorial jewellery

In current memorial jewellery the hourglass plays a very small part. Two contexts:

Gothic and dark academia jewellery. In the subcultures that take up historicising memento mori imagery, the hourglass appears alongside skull, scythe and skeleton as an accompanying iconographic element. Usually as a graphic printed motif on T-shirts, as a tattoo or on jewellery pendants, more rarely as an elaborately crafted jewellery element.

Conceptual memorial jewellery. Individual contemporary jewellery artists work with the hourglass as a cipher of transience - in small pendants with a working miniature hourglass, for instance, or in ring constructions with an enclosed body of sand. Such pieces are one-offs without a mass market.

In the conventional workshop practice of modern memorial jewellery (fingerprint pendants, photograph lockets, memorial rings) the hourglass does not appear. As a pictorial symbol it is confined to the Baroque memento mori legacy and belongs to the deeper historical stratum of mourning iconography, not to the living jewellery practice of the twenty-first century.

The hourglass as a cultural deep stratum

The symbolic force of the hourglass reaches far beyond mourning jewellery. It appears regularly in modern popular culture:

• As the icon for a busy system in computing (the hourglass cursor of early Windows versions)
• As a board element in strategy and storytelling games
• As a graphic element in films, novels and comics that treat transience or the pressures of time
• As a tattoo motif within the memento mori tradition

This broader cultural presence keeps the hourglass alive as a cipher of transience, even though it is barely used in the narrower field of mourning jewellery. It remains one of the conceptually most stable allegories in European culture - a thousand-year-old image that has not lost its iconographic clarity.