Memento Mori

Memento mori is Latin for “remember (that you have) to die” and a reminder that all people will die, regardless of status or wealth. Medieval and Renaissance art pieces with the memento mori theme often were quite grotesque and meant to scare, often featuring revenants as the main subject. Its purpose was to get people to meditate on their death, and imagine what their afterlife would look like. Thinking about one's own dead body decaying was considered an extension of prayer, and seen as a form of affective piety.

The Three Living and the Three Dead
Many medieval-era paintings exist depicting three living people (usually of noble or high social standing) being visited by three skeletal corpses to remind them that death is coming.

This version of The Three Living and the Three Dead is a memento mori painting depicting the title three men dressed in their impressive regalia of expensive clothes and gold crowns. However in the three corpses that represent each of the powerful men are naked and skeletal. Their flesh is rotten and looks grotesque. Only their crowns remain as an identifier of who they used to be. It carries the message that in the bigger picture of medieval cosmology, they will be judged by the same standards under the same God after death.

Transi Tombs
Transi tombs are a type of tomb with a life-like sculpture of the person buried as well as one of a naked, decaying corpse or a skeleton. Oftentimes, the life-like effigy had the person lavishly clad, in their full regalia, contrasted with the naked and decaying skeleton underneath. They were designed to remind viewers of the fleeting nature of mortal life and the eternity of death and the afterlife. It shows that even great people of power have the same death as everybody else, and that worldly possessions have no meaning in death. These tombs were a visual representation to show that the person was spending time in Purgatory suffering.

The Danse Macabre
The Dance Macabre, or the dance of death, was a prominent example displaying the memento mori theme in many paintings and other art forms in Europe. The earliest known artistic depiction of the danse was as a mural in the cemetery at Les Innocents in Paris. Although the mural was destroyed centuries ago, the written text and overall composition has been preserved through printing my Guyot Marchant. The mural is thought to have had some thirty figures in a dialogue with death, all espousing the message of the memento mori. Due to inconsistencies in printing, it is unclear if the people are talking to dead corpses or Death itself. The people in the danse are from various levels of society, ranging from the Pope to lowly laborers.

Although the mural in Paris is gone, many other Danse Macabre paintings from later years still exist in Europe today.

Music
The Danse Macabre has inspired numerous musical pieces based on its theme to the modern day. The most famous of these is Camille Saint-Saëns' tone poem, Danse Macabre. More recent musical adaptations include a song from the Swedish heavy metal group Ghost, titled Dance Macabre. This song also incorporates vampires into the music video.