zuno

"We were what you are; But the time will come, And it will come to you swiftly, when ye shall be what we are."

Like the dance of death and the triumph of death, the motif is emblematic of the medieval admonition memento mori. Simultaneous depiction of the topoi is common, for example in Francesco Traini's mid-fourteenth-century fresco Triumph of Death, which depicts the three living and the three dead. The legend was also integrated in the Dance of Death by Kientzheim.

A fresco from the Isefjord workshop in the church of Tuse (Denmark) from the 15th century shows three mounted kings on the hunt, who are met by three dead kings from whom maggots and worms escape. Each of them is assigned a banner. On the first dead man's banner is written: "Vos qui transitis n(os)t(r)i me(m)ores rogo sitis" (You who are passing by, I beg you: Remember us), on the second: "Quod sumus hoc eritis" (What we are now, you shall become one day) and on the third: "Fuimus aliquando quod estis" (We were once what you are now). Above their heads one reads: "Heu qua(n)tus est noster dolor" (Oh, how great is our pain)."