Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Momus.
The gallery
Momus Criticizes the Gods’ Creations
Maerten van Heemskerck, 1561
A painting by the Dutch Mannerist Maerten van Heemskerck illustrating the classical fable in which Momus, the personification of fault-finding, is asked to judge the creations of the gods and mocks them all in turn, a man, a bull and a house among them. The episode, known from Aesop and retold by Lucian, made Momus the patron figure of carping critics, and for his unrelenting censure he was cast out of Olympus.
Momos
Jacob Jordaens, 17th century
In this Flemish Baroque canvas by Jacob Jordaens, now in Malmö Konstmuseum, Momus appears as a half-length figure of ridicule — the winged fault-finder of Greek myth who carped at the gods until Olympus cast him out. Jordaens gives the daimon a blunt, satirical presence rather than a crowded Lucianic contest of creations, concentrating the whole character of mockery into a single gaze and gesture. The painting stands among the rare post-antique portraits that treat Momus himself as the subject, not merely an allegory tucked into a larger pantheon scene.
Momus — the Greek God of Ridicule
Unknown (woodcut for August Heinrich Petiscus), 1878
This nineteenth-century woodcut engraving, published in August Heinrich Petiscus's Der Olymp oder die Mythologie der Griechen und Römer (Leipzig, 1878), freezes Momus in the popular handbook image of the god of satire and blame. Cloaked and gesturing as a personification rather than a narrative actor, he embodies the Hesiodic and later comic tradition of Momus as the spirit who finds fault with everything. The print supplied generations of schoolroom and parlor readers with their visual cue for the daimon of ridicule.