memento mori Print

Events and past occurrences are staged dramatically and stage-like, by means of sweeping up and down curves and exaggerated proportions. Animal figures, borrowed from Baroque hunting scenes, and the inevitable stag from the Biedermeier era are spectators in the midst of a frivolous and superficial hustle and bustle. The basic ideas of the Rococo are the ideal of the love of an individual and nature as a refuge of a dreamed Arcadia. The Latin saying "Memento mori", which in the Middle Ages was the motto of a monastic counter-movement against the moral decay of the Christian church in particular, means the remembrance of one's own mortality. In German, this saying can be rendered as "Gedenke zu sterben." In contrast to the ancient Roman "Memento moriendum esse" ("Remember that you are mortal"), with which generals were warned against hubris during their triumphal march in Rome, the medieval "Memento mori" calls man into self-reflection on his own existence and confronts him with the fact of his own finitude and transience. The certainty of one's own death, the certainty of the transience of earthly existence, is now one of the basic facts of human existence like hardly anything else - and a life mindful of one's own death, a life as if there were no tomorrow, means a very different life than the one lived in the feeling of endlessness according to the motto "tomorrow is also another day." At the same time, death as an existential phenomenon is given less and less space in our modern society. Mass death, which is consumed through the media and from a distance, is often accompanied by a tabooing of everything that makes one's own transience tangible.