Guy Richards Smit

Memento mori is Latin for “remember death.”

The phrase is believed to originate with an ancient Roman custom. That tradition instructed victorious generals on how they should enter vanquished cities and towns. The rule was that a loyal servant should stand behind his general as he led his troops’ triumphal entry. As the venerated official basked in the glory of the cheering crowds, the servant would hiss the following admonition into his ear: “Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!.” That is, “Look behind you! Remember that you are only a man! Remember that you will die!”

Throughout history, memento mori have appeared in many forms. Some, like the general’s aide de marcher, were there to quell undignified superiority. Others, like Holbein’s sumptuous painting The Ambassadors (1533), were invented to inspire zest for life. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” Centuries later, the essayist Michel de Montaigne became fond of an ancient Egyptian custom. During times of festivities, a skeleton would be brought out with people cheering: “Drink and be merry for when you’re dead you will look like this.”

Guy Smit, for his part, has taken a more modern and cumulative approach to depicting death. After visiting the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, Bohemia—popularly known as the “Bone Church,” it displays some 40,000 skeletons in the form of bone chandeliers, bone chalices, bone candelabras, bone monstrances (the vessel used to display the Eucharistic host) as well as enormous bone pyramids that contain centuries of death and dying—he found himself strangely inspired yet inexplicably flummoxed by his own lack of reaction to the spectacle of overflowing necrosis.

“I couldn’t really empathize with the skulls until I decided one was the baker,” he said about Kutná Hora’s pile-up of death. When he got to the studio, though, he painted a delicate yellow and brown number as if dashing off a portrait of a friend. He titled it Dull But Kind (2015). The subsequent three hundred and ninety-nine skulls Smit produced were, evidently, variations on the maid, the butcher and the candlestick maker.

— CVF, USFCAM (excerpted from the monograph A Mountain of Skulls (And Not One I Recognize), forthcoming from Trela)