People sometimes tell me that skulls and dead insects are a modern taste, a symptom of something. They are roughly two thousand years late to that observation. The instinct to keep death in the room, decoratively, deliberately, where you can see it, is one of the oldest and most persistent habits in Western visual culture.
What follows is a short history of that habit: where it starts, the forms it takes, why it goes quiet for most of the twentieth century, and what the current revival is actually doing.
Rome: a whisper and a mosaic
The phrase memento mori is Latin — "remember that you must die" — and the most repeated origin story is that a slave rode behind a victorious Roman general during his triumph, holding the laurel crown above his head and murmuring a reminder of his mortality into the noise of the crowd. The story comes down to us through Tertullian, writing much later, and historians treat the details with caution. As an image of what the idea is for, it is perfect: a corrective applied at the exact moment of maximum self-regard.
The material evidence is firmer than the anecdote. A mosaic from Pompeii, now in the Naples archaeological museum, shows a skull balanced on a level, with a butterfly and a wheel beneath — death levelling rich and poor, the soul as a winged thing, fortune turning. Roman dining rooms carried skeleton figures. Silver drinking cups were decorated with them. The message was less penitential than Epicurean: the hour is short, so pour the wine.
The butterfly on that mosaic is not incidental. Psyche in Greek means both "soul" and "butterfly", and the metamorphosis of a crawling thing into a winged one was too neat an allegory for anyone to leave alone. It has been carrying that freight ever since — which is worth knowing if you have a pinned butterfly on your wall and have never asked yourself why the image feels the way it does.
The medieval turn: the dance and the worm
Christianity changed the emphasis. The Roman version said life is short, enjoy it. The medieval version said life is short, and afterwards you will be judged. Same reminder, opposite instruction.
Out of that came the danse macabre, the dance of death: painted on charnel-house walls and church cloisters across Europe from the fourteenth century, in the immediate wake of the Black Death. The composition is always the same. Skeletons lead the living away in a procession, and the procession is scrupulously ranked — pope, emperor, cardinal, king, bishop, knight, merchant, labourer, child. The point is the ordering. Death takes them in rank and death does not care about rank, and the joke is that both statements are true at once.
The English produced the transi tomb, which is the most confrontational object in the whole tradition: a two-tier monument with the deceased carved above in full ceremonial dress and, directly beneath, the same person as a decaying cadaver, sometimes with carved worms. These were commissioned by the subjects themselves, in advance, at considerable expense. It is difficult to overstate how strange that is by modern standards — the equivalent of paying a sculptor to render your own corpse and installing it in a public building.
Dutch vanitas: the genre at its technical peak
The seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was rich, Calvinist and extremely good at painting. Those three facts collided to produce vanitas still life — the most sophisticated and most self-contradictory memento mori ever made.
The genre takes its name from Ecclesiastes: vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. The paintings assemble objects, each carrying a fixed meaning, and the vocabulary is consistent enough to read like a language.
| Object | Reads as |
|---|---|
| Skull | Death itself; the anchor of the composition |
| Extinguished or guttering candle | A life just ended, or ending as you watch |
| Soap bubbles | Homo bulla — man is a bubble; beauty and its duration |
| Hourglass, pocket watch | Measured, finite, audible time |
| Overripe or cut fruit | Decay already underway beneath a perfect skin |
| Books, instruments, globes | Learning, which does not exempt you |
| Jewels, coins, fine glass | Wealth, which does not exempt you either |
| Butterfly | The soul; resurrection; the one hopeful note |
| Fly | Corruption, and a painter's small joke about trompe-l'œil |
| Wilting tulip | Speculative folly, after the 1637 crash — a very local reference |
The contradiction at the heart of the genre is delicious and entirely deliberate. These are paintings that condemn worldly luxury, rendered with astonishing technical luxury, sold at high prices to wealthy merchants who hung them in rooms full of the objects being condemned. Harmen Steenwijck and Pieter Claesz built careers on it. The buyer got to feel penitent and to own something gorgeous. Nobody involved seems to have found this awkward.
The Victorians: the industrial era of grief
The nineteenth century did not invent mourning, but it did industrialise it. High infant mortality, cholera, tuberculosis and a very long royal widowhood combined into a culture with formal rules for grief and an entire economy built to supply them.
Mourning dress was codified by stage and duration — deep mourning in dull black crape for a year and a day for a widow, then second mourning, then half-mourning in grey, mauve and lavender, the whole progression taking around two and a half years. Dedicated warehouses such as Jay's of Regent Street existed to supply nothing else.
Hair work
The most intimate and, to modern eyes, the strangest survival. Human hair — the part of a body that does not decay — was woven, plaited and set into brooches, rings, watch chains and bracelets. Elaborate examples were built into wreaths and framed under glass, with hair from multiple family members forming different flowers on the same branch. It was not morbid by contemporary standards. It was tender. It was the only way, before photography was cheap, to keep something physical of a person you loved.
Post-mortem photography
Early photography was expensive and slow, and many families' only portrait of a child was taken after death — the subject posed, sometimes with siblings, eyes occasionally painted onto the print. These were not hidden. They sat in the album with everything else.
Entomological cabinets
And here, finally, is where this shop's inheritance sits. The Victorian mania for natural history collecting — beetles, butterflies, ferns, shells, eggs — put a glazed specimen case in a great many middle-class parlours. It was framed as science, and often was, but it was also decor, also status, and also, unmistakably, a display of preserved dead things arranged for beauty. The mahogany cabinets in museum stores today are the survivors of a domestic craze.
The twentieth-century silence, and the return
Then it stops. Two world wars produced death at a scale that made decorative memento mori feel obscene. Dying moved out of the home and into the hospital; undertaking became a profession that handled the body so the family did not have to. By the 1950s the Western middle class had achieved something historically peculiar: it was possible to reach adulthood having never seen a corpse.
The taboo held for perhaps fifty years, and then broke — noisily. Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted platinum skull For the Love of God (2007) is a vanitas in every formal respect, restaged at a scale that made the old contradiction impossible to miss. The natural-death and green-burial movements pushed in from another direction. Death cafés and the "death positive" movement made the conversation explicit.
Alongside all of that, a broad revival of oddity collecting: taxidermy, wet specimens, entomology, curiosity cabinets, bone art. Much of it is aesthetic rather than philosophical, and some of it is straightforwardly a fashion. But the underlying appetite looks familiar. A generation that lost the vocabulary is reaching for objects that carry it.
Every culture that has looked directly at death has also decorated it. The decoration is not denial. It is the looking, made bearable enough to keep doing. Studio notes
What it means on a shelf today
I am not going to claim that a butterfly in a box is a spiritual practice. Most people buy one because it is beautiful, and beautiful is a complete reason.
But it is worth knowing what you have got. A pinned butterfly under glass is a psyche, a soul-image, in an unbroken line back to a Pompeian floor. Dried flowers are the cut fruit of a vanitas. A skull is a skull, and has meant precisely one thing for two thousand years. These objects arrive pre-loaded whether or not anyone at the point of sale mentions it.
What has changed is the instruction attached. The Roman said drink. The medieval Church said repent. The Dutch merchant said both, please, and make it a good frame. The contemporary version is quieter and mostly says: notice this. You will not always be here, the thing in the box was alive for three weeks and is beautiful anyway, and those two facts sit together comfortably if you let them.
If you want to see how the objects themselves are made, the companion piece is The Anatomy of a Shadow Box.
