Late medieval Christian culture was highly tactile, focusing on objects and their materiality to engage with the holy. Macabre art became extremely popular during this time as well, combining the preference of visual and tactile devotion with the beliefs surrounding the veneration of the body. This gave rise to memento mori (remember the dead) iconography, which was used in visual art, as well as for personal adornment.

The propagation of memento mori pendants demonstrates a shift in culture at the end of the medieval period. Both views on death and death ritual, as well as the growing individualism that is seen in the Renaissance age, are represented by these objects. A pendant from the Wernher Collection is emblematic of these themes, but it also speaks to the growing materialism and conspicuous consumption of the early modern period. Furthermore, it also represents a cultural recontextualization as a part of a late 19th-century Kunstkammer, allowing for a better understanding of the fascinations with the macabre and grotesque in this later period.

Memento Mori Pendants

Memento mori pendants were primarily used as a devotional piece. Huizinga (1924) believed that the growth of macabre art during the early modern era stood as the emblem of the “waning of the Middle Ages”, with imagery of death and decay, such as that of memento mori, juxtaposing the healthy optimism, egotism, and modernity of the Renaissance. Memento mori address key spiritual and emotional needs that stemmed from a shifting religious culture at the end of the medieval period and lent themselves to more privatised, individual devotional and mourning practices.

Changes in Religious Beliefs and Death Culture

In the late medieval period, the body was considered an object of veneration in the Christian belief system. The transformation of the body, particularly regarding the redemptive body of Christ, was seen to salvation when used for devotional imagery. Macabre art, such as memento mori jewellery, created a “negative mirror image” to this symbolism, centring on decay and putrefaction of the body after death as opposed to its veneration. The use of human body imagery in memento mori appears to be geared towards changing moral behaviour and the push for Christians to become more focused on living a “good” life.

The size and style of memento mori pendants suggest that they were intended to be held in one’s hand, to ruminate on the transitory nature of life by rubbing and turning the piece over to regard both living and dead figures. The use of these pendants in this way is connected to the late medieval embrace of the need to mortify oneself. Medieval Christian ideology considered physical and mental pain to be a necessary condition that would help lead them to salvation. It is likely that artists and their patrons utilised decaying corpses to inspire mental anguish to be accepted into Heaven, and to accept the transitoriness of physical beauty and worldly pleasures through these objects. Half-death motifs best demonstrate the dichotomy. This style addressed themes both of earthly pleasures and of mortality to show their interconnectivity as well as the inevitability of death and the loss of these pleasures, perhaps warning of the futility of materiality or potentially relating to the notion of carpe diem.

Few things mattered more to late medieval Christians than the fate of their soul after death, and achieving salvation was a large part of the religious culture in this period. In Catholic beliefs, tithes and prayers were used by the living to help affect the condition of the dead and help them out of Purgatory. However, in the new protestant age of northern Europe, the doctrine of Purgatory was removed, leaving the living powerless to affect the judgment of the dead. Christian patrons instead focused on living a good life to achieve salvation, since they could no longer be helped through prayer after death. This shift caused a change in mourning and memorial material culture.

From the late fifteenth and early 16th-century memento mori begin demonstrating varying levels of putrefaction of the corpse. This appears to represent warnings of the futility of materiality, using putrefaction and vermin motifs on many of these pendants. Threats of putrefaction were likely geared towards altering human behaviour, which is also reflected in the sermons of this era that focused on vermin as symbols not only of death but as the pain of divine punishment:

Think, thou wretched caitiff, how it shall be for thee when thou shalt be cast into a pit under the earth, when toads, worms, snakes and other venomous beasts shall eat thy eyes, thy nose, thy mouth… and all thy body. Then who shall be thy help, thy comfort, thy refuge? …Therefore, thou wretched caitiff, now, when time still remains for mercy and pity, run to that dear lord Jesus and say ‘Mercy, dear Jesus’.

Rolle via robbins, 1996: 32

The use of toads and worms as threats of harm were likely more potent for their audience, as they were tangible and could readily be pictured. The use of this imagery on memento mori was intended to warn the beholder of what was to come, were they consumed with earthly pleasures and materialism, as toads were also commonly connected with notions of avarice and gluttony. These sins that were likely common in the increasingly material and consumption centred early modern period, and threats of what was to come to those who indulged were probably used to prompt them to seek salvation to avoid this fate after death. his fits into the larger themes of macabre art of the late medieval and early modern periods but is much more tactile in relation to the prints and sculptural elements that are also common at this time.

Individualisation

Memento mori also feed into the growing philosophical beliefs surrounding individualism in the early modern period, which was particularly common in northern Europe. In the sixteenth century, the idea of individual personhood begins to flourish, allowing a person to define themselves in relation to the collective. Macabre art, in this sense, can be seen as “the final phase in the relationship between death and individualism”, as it combines previous religious notions on death with the Renaissance beliefs of humanism and the values of worldly existence. The growth of individualism in the early modern era led to the creation of personalised, individual, memento mori pendants and death portraiture, where skeletal carvings appear to not represent Death in the abstract, but an individual’s own future self. This focus on individualism and death is also directly connected to the horrors of mass death that followed the plagues of the fourteenth century. These events created a fear of losing a sense of identity after death, creating a need to immortalise oneself so as not to become lost amongst the faceless dead.

Furthermore, increasingly visual rhetoric in the late medieval era allowed the Christian narrative to become relevant and accessible to a much wider audience. This influenced a change in production, consumption, and religious practices entering the early modern period to accommodate more personal and individual religious meditation and devotion. Miniaturisation allowed scaled-down versions of Christian motifs to become a part of everyday private life, found on accessories, jewellery, and tableware, allowing for a more tactile encounter with religious beliefs. Rosaries becoming popular by the fourteenth century for private devotion, particularly to the virgin Mary and demonstrate a more individualistic means of devotion that emerged during this time, directly connected to memento mori pendants, as many were attached to rosaries or related chaplets. In the late fourteenth century, strands of beads like rosaries and chaplets were used to count Ave Marias, connected to a specific book of prayers known as a rosary. This was a more private and individualistic type of prayer used to aid in securing the salvation of one’s soul, as opposed to larger services and mass.

The Wernher Pendant

See the Pendant in 3D Here (via English Heritage)

The notion of individuality regarding the cultural significance of the memento mori pendants is key when considering each piece. The Wernher pendant is no exception. Not only does it demonstrate culturally specific meanings surrounding the era when it was made and initially used, but also the recontextualization of this piece later when it becomes part of Wernher’s collection in the late nineteenth century.

The Wernher memento mori pendant has not been attributed to a specific workshop, but it is assumed to have been made in Flanders around 1500. It is 76.2mm in height and is made of elephant ivory. At the end of the medieval period, it was quite fashionable for jewellery and religious objects to incorporate exotic materials. Most ivory carved in Europe during this period originated in Africa, traded in through late 15th-century Portuguese merchants. Elephant ivory is easily workable and perfect for small-scale carving, causing it to be in great demand in the Low Countries and Central Europe in the early modern era.

This memento mori pendant is believed to have been part of a rosary or a chaplet, which was common during the early modern period. The juxtaposition of the portrait and the corpse is the epitome of the macabre, showing how life and death are twinned, and yet opposed. This demonstrates life and death, the natural and social states of being, are twinned but opposed, a central theme to the visual culture of the post-Reformation death ritual.

Though such pendants were originally intended for use in prayer and Christian worship, the Wernher pendant was not actually used as a devotional piece. There was a rapid increase of jewellery worn in this period, with pendant ornaments as one of the unconditional favourites amongst this new class. Pendants and pseudo-devotional jewellery were a centrepiece of physical expression in the Middle Ages, used to glorify self and family as well as present virtues and vice to an individual. Were the piece used as part of a rosary or other type of devotional practice, the details of the piece would be much more worn away. Ivory also becomes more yellowed when in contact with human skin, but the Wernher pendant appears to remain its natural colour and with most of its original detail. The lack of evidence surrounding the use of this pendant for worship shifts its meaning, connecting it more with the growing materialism and conspicuous consumption of the rising merchant class during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Artists began to take established styles and forms, such as the macabre and playing with their usage and meaning to create objet d’art. This reduced the religious significance in memento mori, such as this pendant, and changed their cultural meaning to focus more on conspicuous consumption; where religion once monopolised use of the pendants in association with death, individuals of the period instead focused on the aestheticism of the designs.

A different pendant that is clearly well used. There is yellowing of the ivory from oils of the owner’s hands and both sides have lost a lot of detail, likely due to rubbing on the surface. It is worth noting, however, that the skull has lost more of its detail, further cementing its use for rumination on death (British Museum, acc. No. 1856,0623.134)

The reclassification of the Wernher pendant based on the lack of evidence surrounding its use for prayer allows for a better understanding of the growing materiality and conspicuous consumption of the early modern era. It demonstrates a shift in cultural significance and the importance of macabre art coming out of its medieval connections with mourning and fears of the black death.

It is likely, now that the pendant has seemingly reached the end of its use-life as it is part of a museum collection, that it can still be admired much in the same way it was in the nineteenth century, appreciated for its craftsmanship and the macabre curiosity it presents. However, whilst the pendant evoked the same thoughts on death and decay of the body that it was intended to in the sixteenth century, warning of the imminence of death or the putrefaction of the soul in the style of the corpse if one did not live a “good” life, it also represents an objet d’art, enjoyed for its aestheticism.

The Werhner Pendant belongs to the Werhner Collection, English Heritage

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