Maerten van Heemskerck’s Momus and the moment of critique

Abstract

which the critic advises the painter to depict Justice with an eye in the back of the head as well as one in the front. B. Fiera, De ivsticia pingenda: On the Painting of Justice; A Dialogue between Mantegna and Momus, trans. J. Wardrop (London, 1957), 30. J. Resnik and D. E. Curtis, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in CityStates and Democratic Courtrooms (New Haven, CT, 2011), 93. The word “art,” like the word “craft,” or the word Kunst, has a shadowy side that indicates guile. Hence the word “artless,” which means free from deceit. While the primary function of a work of art may be to show, it can do so by coy means. The work of art may contain passages that dart away from the purpose of revealing, indicating by devices such as curtains, pouches, or folds, that there is substance within, though obscured from view. It is for the purpose of drawing out these tuckedaway messages that the work of art invites interpretation of a particular sort. Hermeneutics is the work of Hermes, the mediator between the divine and human worlds. But in the Netherlands, in the mid-sixteenth-century, specifically, in 1561, a different quasi-god was introduced as the go-between traversing the two realms, one who could also be employed as a guide in the reception of art. This was Momus, the god of criticism, expelled from Olympus for too severely judging the divine. The story of Momus acting as arbiter among the gods is told in Aesop’s Fables and Lucian’s Hermotimus (both of which were printed in Latin translations in northern Europe in the 1520s), and in Leon Battista Alberti’s political satire Momus, subtitled The Prince, which was composed in 1492, dedicated to Sigismondo Malatesta, banned, then published in 1520. Each of these texts tells how, when Zeus created the world, a contest was held to see which immortal could make the best gift for Earth. Momus found fault with each deity’s craft. Of Poseidon’s bull, he judged that the eyes should be atop the horns to enable better sight when charging forth; Athena’s house should have been mounted on wheels to make its location mobile in the event of having to flee bad neighbors; of Hephaestus’s invention, a man, Momus quipped that, while almost perfect, the construction could have been improved if a window