Memento mori is Latin for "remember that you must die." In art, it names any image or object made to remind viewers of their own death: a skull beside a living face, a skeleton on a tomb, an hourglass running out. One of the best known lies on the floor of Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, painted in 1533: a gray smear between two men's feet that becomes a skull from the painting's bottom right corner.
The words themselves are Latin, and English dictionaries record them from the 1590s. Most people who look them up are told that they began with the Romans, in one of the great ceremonies of ancient Rome.
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That ceremony was the triumph, the parade a Roman general was granted after a great victory. He rode through the city in a chariot before a cheering crowd, and the story goes that a slave stood behind him, whispering memento mori into his ear so that he would not take himself for a god.
The slave probably never said it. The usual source for the story is Tertullian, an early Christian author, and in his version a voice at the general's back tells him to look behind him and remember that he is only a man. No slave appears, and death is never mentioned.
The classicist Mary Beard, who wrote a whole book on the Roman triumph, calls this flimsy evidence for a custom. The carved scenes of triumphs that survive tell a different story about who stood behind the general.
What You'll Discover
Who really stood behind the Roman general.
The skeleton that speaks to churchgoers in Florence.
Where to stand to see Holbein's skull.
Why a prince was carved as a corpse.
How memento mori differs from vanitas.