Memento Mori

Reflection upon death to come has played a large role in the artistic production of Western culture. Horace (65 BC - 8 BC) wrote in his Odes a meditation on this fleeting life, encouraging present revels:

Pale death with foot impartial knocks at the poor man's cottage and at princes' palaces. Despite they fortune, Sestius, life's brief span forbids they entering on far-reaching hopes. Soon shall the night of Death enshroud thee, and the phantom shades and Pluto's cheerless hall. As soon as though com'st thither, no longer shalt thou by the dice obtain the lordship of the feast, nor gaze with wonder on the tender Lycidas, of whom the maidens soon shall glow with love.

pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas
regumque turres. O beate Sesti,
vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam.
iam te premet nox fabulaeque Manes

et domus exilis Plutonia; quo simul mearis,
nec regna vini sortiere talis,
nec tenerum Lycidan mirabere, quo calet iuventus
nunc omnis et mox virgines tepebunt.
--excerpted from Odes, I.iv,
Horace. Odes and Elegies. Translated by C. E. Bennet. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard, 1978.

His admonition to enjoy oneself now did not last long in the Christian tradition. Christ explicitly promised salvation in the life to come:

In my Father's house are many mansions: if not, I would have told you, because I
go to prepare a place for you. And if I shall go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself: that where I am, there ye also may be.
--John 14.2-3.

The glory of the present was shifted to the glory of the future life and the promise of heaven.

Beginning around the thirteenth century, shriveled decomposing figures representing the dead began to appear in funerary art, either as stories, like the Three Living and the Three Dead, a folk tale in which three youths go into the woods and encounter three corpses who encourage them to redeem their souls before it is too late, or as representations on tombs of the actual person commemorated, decomposing. The figure of death, exhorting the living to remember that their death will come, appears in much art and many sumptuary objects of the later middle ages, perhaps because of the increased presence of death in Europe brought by the Black Plague. Devotional objects such as this rosary chaplet [17.190.306] and even ornamental jewelry such as this pendant [17.190.305] feature as equal parts merry youths and rotting dead. The iconography and in the case of the chaplet the inscription, specifically address the user to cogita mori - contemplate death.