Memento Mori,

1612

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the rise of the flower still life as an independent genre in Northern Europe. Though such works might seem like straightforward celebrations of natural beauty, they were almost always imbued with moralizing and often religious messages about the brevity of life and the vanity of beauty and material wealth—made explicit in the prints here through inscriptions. De Passe’s “Memento Mori”— literally a reminder of death’s inevitability—features a child pointing to a skull, accompanied by an hourglass and vase of soon-to-wilt flowers. The inscriptions on Hoefnagel’s engravings are slightly subtler: “He who desires that his most cultivated garden flourish with various little flowers, but neglects his mind and doesn’t enrich it with any arts, has his priorities topsy-turvy.” At the same time, the variety and beauty of the natural world was understood to demonstrate God’s splendor and His role as the ultimate artificer.