MEMENTO MORI
In theory we know we’re going to die. But there is a huge difference between an intellectual knowledge of the fact - and a direct sensory realisation. The oversight costs us dear, for it is only through a visceral awareness of our impending end that we are granted the courage and urgency to get on with the vital (but often daunting) tasks of our lives. The Renaissance artistic tradition of the Memento Mori (‘Reminder of death’) provided striking visual images to keep the idea of our own mortality and the radically uncertain time of our demise constantly before our eyes. The theorists of this tradition grasped that for an idea to be compelling and to guide our conduct with true force, it needs to come via art – that is, wrapped up in a seductive outer layer that appeals to our emotions. We need to see a haunting skull, weeping mourners, rotting flesh, so that what might otherwise have been merely abstract and easily dismissed can turn into a resonant truth with a chance of truly influencing how we live. The Memento Mori is an example of art being used for a precise psychological purpose. Instead of waiting for artists to produce whatever happened to interest them, the philosophers of the Renaissance identified important needs and commissioned artists to work on them. Painters were given a specific job description: makers of things that remind us of death. Ideas were united with the tools for their powerful transmission. Such a psychological mission should remain a central purpose of artistic activity. The task of art is to find new and freshly forceful ways of keeping the most important ideas about how to live and die well constantly at the front of our minds.
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