The early career of the Florentine painter Giovanni Martinelli (1600 or 1604-59) remains relatively unknown. He moved to Florence from Arezzo by 1621. Among his earliest surviving works is a cycle of frescoes dated 1634 in Pistoia, and he is known to have been a member of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence in 1635. His frescoes in Pistoia betray the influence of the clear narrative style of Santi di Tito and his use of shimmering, sharp colors recalls that of his compatriots Bernardo Poccetti (who also frescoed at Pistoia) and Cesare Dandini. Martinelli’s works of the 1630s, including the Memento Mori, are similar in style to those of the Florentine painters Filippo Tarchiani and Anastagio Fontebuoni. Throughout his career, Martinelli continued to paint moralizing allegories, although in the 1640s and 1650s he also received commissions for altarpieces.

Martinelli’s colorful and dramatic painting underscores the unpredictable and swift arrival of death. Its Latin title, Memento Mori, means “Remember, you shall die.” A group of expensively and modishly dressed men and women cavorting around a table laden with lush fruits and pastries is suddenly interrupted by the appearance on the extreme right, in dark shadow, of a skeleton holding an hourglass. The once happy banqueters react with dramatic gestures and call out in surprise. The contrast between the youthful revelers enjoying mundane pleasures and the macabre reality of death was only too real in times of plague, since the pestilence often arrived without warning, attacking affluent and poor alike.