The Apocalypse Sent Up: A Parody of the Papacy by Leon Battista Alberti

We're still looking for the key to Leon Battista Alberti's satiric novel Momus. There's no agreement on how it should be interpreted as a whole, on the identities of its personages or on the historical events to which it alludes. So wrote Nanni Balestrini in his preface to the most recent edition of the work. ² In proposing a new literary source for Momus, I intend to try to pick the lock, for from this new literary model will follow new identifications for some of Alberti's characters, a different intellectual context to which he responds, a new date, and a new interpretation of his purpose.

It has been shown, convincingly and exhaustively, that Alberti drew heavily from Lucian for Momus' personages and events, especially from Lucian's Parliament of the Gods and Zeus the Tragic Actor, in both of which Alberti's title character, Momus, is a protagonist. ³ There are numerous borrowings from other of Lucian's writings, and some from Lucretius, Cicero, the Hermetic corpus, ⁴ and perhaps from Plato's Republic. ⁵

These identifications are useful, but they aren't sufficient. They don't account, for instance, for Momus' main narrative, which is about Jupiter's project to replace the existing world with a more perfect one. David Marsh's recent suggestion—that the story derives from a myth related in a lost Homeric epic cycle known through a Scholia on the Iliad owned by Aurispa and through him perhaps available to Alberti—suggests how arduous the search has become. ⁶ I suggest that a direct model for Momus' plot and a key to its interpretation is much nearer to hand. It was not written by Lucian but by another Second Sophistic author, known as John. It is the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse, which has for its subject, as does Momus, the end of this world and the creation of a better one. This source may have eluded detection because, since Momus is clearly political and classicizing, it hasn't been regarded as religious and theological. Even so, this quite obvious relation between the two works would surely have been recognized were it not that, unthinkably, Momus is a send up of the Apocalypse, its catastrophic reversal. In Momus, the coming of the new creation, the heavenly city of peace and justice, is not the longed-for fulfillment of Christian hope but an arbitrary threat by a vain and capricious despot, averted only by his inability to bring it about. Thus it belongs to that genre of biblical black humor of which Monty Python was, in our times, heir. Since very little is known about Alberti's religious thought—it has been doubted that he thought about religion ⁷ —Momus is a uniquely revealing work.

A brief summary of Momus' plot, contrasting it with the "straight" version, will show what I mean. But while the plot outline derives from the Apocalypse—that, I think, would have been the tip-off to the Renaissance reader—the humor of Momus throughout depends on reversal of expectation, the expectations of Christian readers familiar with the Bible and more generally with Christian theology. In other words, your average educated fifteenth-century person, especially of the curial type. Because Christian belief is assumed by Alberti—not unreasonable for a writer himself in minor orders employed by the pope—it is not stated. This silence has misled modern scholars to interpret the classicizing trappings of Momus as primary to its content. I am suggesting, instead, that Momus is a parody of the Apocalypse in classical dress.

Now to the story. The "prince and maker of all things," whose deeds "nothing surpasses and nothing equals"—this is how Alberti refers to Jupiter in Momus —hates his job. Everyone, he says, gods and mortals alike, does nothing but complain. Everyone wants...