A Year in Pictures – 5 February 2015 – Memento Mori

Monument on the north-east wall of St Katharine Cree, Leadenhall Street, in the City of London.

I am often asked why the churches I work for (and churches in general) contain so much skull imagery. The simplest explanation, though it can be refined and elaborated, is that the sculpted skulls and bones are to remind those who look upon them of the inevitability of death. We know death awaits us, but our ancestors lived in closer conscious proximity to the frequent experience of death and disease. Sometimes inscriptions on monuments have words such as the following:

What you are, I was. What I am, you will be.