1. Much additional information can, however, be learnt from sepulchral sculpture, prints and drawings, paintings and memento mori jewellery.

2. The stone glares down at us out of the black boundlessness, a memento mori.

3. We need art to tell us, as religion once did, Memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it.

4. For those who grew up in Soviet era, Gagra was a precious refuge of pleasure inside communism's bleak expanse. Now its ruins are a memento mori of poetic deterioration.

5. Crowning the entire composition is a vase of cut flowers, an ulterior memento mori juxtaposed to the terrestrial globe, emblematic of royal power.

6. But the fact that we know it for a memento mori justifies us in feeling a certain human pride.