Memento Mori and Vanitas Art: Why Skulls and Strawberries Belong Together

A skull sitting next to a strawberry isn't a new idea. Painters have been doing some version of this for about four hundred years, they just used to call it something fancier.

What memento mori and vanitas actually mean

Memento mori is Latin for remember you will die, and it's less morbid than it sounds. It's less a threat and more a nudge: don't forget that this is temporary, so maybe pay attention to it. Vanitas paintings are the visual version of that nudge, a genre that really took off in the Netherlands in the 1600s. A vanitas still life typically shows beautiful, desirable things, a ripe piece of fruit, a glass of wine, fresh flowers, cut and arranged right next to a skull, a burnt out candle or an hourglass. The message was always some version of: enjoy this, it won't last, and neither will you.

What's interesting is how much craft went into these warnings. Dutch painters spent real time making that fruit look genuinely delicious and that skull genuinely well lit, because the whole point only works if both halves are equally convincing. A sloppy skull next to bad fruit isn't a meditation on mortality, it's just a bad painting.

Why my strawberries keep finding skulls

I didn't set out to paint vanitas pieces. I set out to paint cake, and a skull kept showing up in it anyway. The Last Dessert is a melting skull cupcake next to a giant strawberry. Strawberry Graveyard hides a small skull inside an otherwise irresistible cake. Indulgence and Decay is built entirely around the tension between luxury and loss. None of these are references to a 17th century Dutch painting tradition I sat down and studied. They're just what happens when sweetness and decay are the two things you're most interested in painting, and it turns out that's the exact same interest a bunch of painters had four centuries ago too.

The through line is the same one vanitas paintings always relied on: you can't fully enjoy the fruit without knowing on some level that it's already starting to go bad. That knowledge doesn't ruin it. If anything, it's what makes it worth painting.

Where to see it in the shop

The Last Dessert, Strawberry Graveyard and Indulgence and Decay are all in the hand-signed print collection, alongside The Creation of Temporary Things, the mouse-and-strawberry piece pictured above. If the sweetness and decay theme is your thing generally, my guide to cute creepy art is a good next stop.

Thank you for letting a four-hundred-year-old painting tradition make its case through a strawberry cake with a secret.