What Is Memento Mori Jewellery?

Memento mori jewellery is jewellery bearing symbols that remind the wearer of the inevitability of death - skulls, skeletons, coffins, hourglasses, and extinguished torches or candles - rather than jewellery commemorating one specific person’s death.

Meaning and Origins

“Memento mori” is Latin for “remember you must die,” and the phrase names both a jewellery tradition and a much broader current in European religious and philosophical thought that treated the constant awareness of mortality as a spur to virtuous living. Memento mori jewellery has strong roots in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, appearing in rings, pendants and other small personal objects well before the mourning-jewellery culture most people associate with the 19th century.

One of the best-known early examples is the Torre Abbey Jewel in the Victoria and Albert Museum, an English gold pendant of the mid-16th century in the form of a small coffin, enamelled and containing a tiny skeleton, with inscriptions around the sides. Pendants of this kind were worn by men and women alike as a visible sign of piety.

A Generic Reminder, Not a Specific Memorial

The key distinction between memento mori jewellery and later mourning jewellery is what each is meant to communicate. Memento mori pieces carried a general reminder of mortality - death as something universal and inevitable - rather than commemorating one named individual. Later mourning jewellery increasingly personalised its symbolism to a specific death, incorporating a deceased person’s initials, hair, portrait or dates. Mourning rings illustrate this shift clearly: 17th-century examples often combined a skull with a specific name and date, while later mourning jewellery moved toward inscriptions and relics tied to one individual, with the explicit memento mori imagery becoming less central over time.

Skull Rings and Death’s-Head Rings

The death’s-head ring - a gold ring with a skull on the bezel, usually enamelled white on black - was familiar enough in Elizabethan and Jacobean England to appear in contemporary plays and wills. In the 17th century the form was refined: the skull might be carved in relief or enamelled, the shank engraved with crossbones, spades and hourglasses, and the inside inscribed with a motto. By the later 17th century many rings combined the skull with the name and death date of a particular person, which is the point at which memento mori and mourning rings become hard to separate.

Stuart Crystal Slides

A distinctive English form of the later 17th century is the “Stuart crystal” - a faceted piece of rock crystal set over a tiny scene or cipher. Beneath the crystal, on a ground of woven hair or silk, the maker arranged initials in fine gold wire, and often figures of skeletons, cherubs, skulls, coffins or hourglasses cut from gold foil and painted. The crystal was mounted as a slide to be threaded on a ribbon at the wrist or neck, or set in a ring, locket or pendant. The name comes from later collectors, who associated the type with the Stuart dynasty and with royalist mourning for Charles I, executed in 1649; royalists did wear rings and lockets with the king’s portrait in his memory. Most surviving examples, however, date from about 1660 to 1720 and commemorate private individuals.

Typical Motifs

Skulls and skeletons were the most direct memento mori symbols, appearing carved, enamelled or engraved on rings, pendants and lockets. Coffins, often in miniature and sometimes opening to reveal a tiny skeleton or shroud-wrapped figure inside, appear on rings and pendants from the same tradition. Hourglasses represented the passage of time running out, and extinguished torches or candles symbolised a life ended. Mottoes - “memento mori” itself, or English phrases warning the reader to prepare for death - were engraved on rings and pendants alongside or instead of these symbols. Skull-shaped watches, made in the late 16th and 17th centuries, carried the same message into a practical object.

Relationship to Vanitas Art

Memento mori jewellery sits within the same broader tradition as vanitas painting, a genre especially associated with 17th-century Dutch and Flemish still-life painters. A well-known example is Harmen Steenwyck’s An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life (c.1640) in the National Gallery, London, with its skull, extinguished lamp and timepiece. Such paintings used the same symbols - skulls, snuffed candles, hourglasses, wilting flowers - to reflect on the transience of life and the certainty of death. Jewellery and painting drew on a shared visual language rather than one directly copying the other.

Later Continuation

Explicit memento mori imagery declined in fashionable jewellery through the 18th century. Skeletons and skulls were still used on mourning rings in the first decades of the century, often enamelled white on a black ground under crystal, but from the 1760s and 1770s neoclassical imagery took over: urns, broken columns, weeping willows and mourning women at tombs, in keeping with the classical taste of the Georgian period. Skull and coffin motifs never disappeared entirely and can still be found on later mourning pieces, particularly in more conservative commissions, and the skull returned as a decorative motif in later 19th- and 20th-century jewellery with little of its original devotional meaning.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a skull ring always a memento mori piece? Not necessarily in later periods - skull motifs continued to appear decoratively and in some mourning contexts well after the height of the memento mori tradition, so context, date and companion symbols matter more than the motif alone.

How can I tell memento mori jewellery from Victorian mourning jewellery? Look at what the piece names: a generic skull, coffin or hourglass without a specific inscription points toward the earlier memento mori tradition, while an inscribed name, date, or a hair or photographic compartment tied to one individual points toward mourning jewellery proper.