The use of the skull in memento mori paintings dates back to the medieval period and reached its height during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Artists utilized the skull as a focal point to encourage contemplation on the certainty of death and the importance of living a moral life in preparation for the hereafter.
It often appears alongside other symbols such as clocks, extinguished candles, and withering flowers, all serving to underscore the theme of temporality, and the inescapable truth of human mortality.
These paintings, often somber and contemplative, are not meant to invoke fear but to offer a philosophical reminder of life's fleeting nature, urging viewers to cherish each moment and live with an awareness of life's fragility and the inevitability of death.
For this new series of images we adapted our AI model trained on hundreds of images of orchids from the Kew gardens database, to generate new orchid species that contain within their structure the subtle form of a human skull.