The
Moses is a
marble sculptureMarble sculpture is the art of creating three-dimensional forms from marble. Sculpture is among the oldest of the arts. Even before painting cave walls, early humans fashioned shapes from stone. From these beginnings, artefacts have evolved to their current complexity...
by Michelangelo Buonarroti 1513–1515 which depicts the
BiblicalThe Bible contains the central religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. Modern Judaism generally recognizes a single set of canonical books known as the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, as it is written almost entirely in the Hebrew language, with some small portions in Aramaic...
figure
MosesMoses was, according to biblical texts, a religious leader, lawgiver, and prophet, to whom the authorship of the Torah is traditionally attributed. Also called Moshe Rabbeinu in Hebrew Moses was, according to biblical texts, a...
, part of the tomb of Pope Julius II.
Originally intended for
St. Peter's BasilicaThe Papal Basilica of Saint Peter , officially known in Italian as the ' and commonly known as St. Peter's Basilica, is located within the Vatican City. St. Peter's Basilica has the largest interior of any Christian church in the world, holding 60,000 people. It is the symbolic "Mother church" of...
, "Moses" and the tomb were instead placed in the minor church of
San Pietro in VincoliSan Pietro in Vincoli is a basilica in Rome, best known for being the home of Michelangelo's magnificent statue of Moses, part of the tomb of Pope Julius II.-History:...
on the Esquiline in
RomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated municipality , with over 2.7 million residents in , while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat to be 3.46 million. The metropolitan area of Rome is estimated by OECD to have a population of 3.7 million...
after the pope's death. This church was patronised by the della Rovere family from which Julius came, and he had been titular cardinal there.
The
statueA statue is a sculpture in the round representing a person or persons, an animal, or an event, normally full-length, as opposed to a bust, and at least close to life-size, or larger...
depicts Moses with horns on his head.
The
Moses is a
marble sculptureMarble sculpture is the art of creating three-dimensional forms from marble. Sculpture is among the oldest of the arts. Even before painting cave walls, early humans fashioned shapes from stone. From these beginnings, artefacts have evolved to their current complexity...
by Michelangelo Buonarroti 1513–1515 which depicts the
BiblicalThe Bible contains the central religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. Modern Judaism generally recognizes a single set of canonical books known as the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, as it is written almost entirely in the Hebrew language, with some small portions in Aramaic...
figure
MosesMoses was, according to biblical texts, a religious leader, lawgiver, and prophet, to whom the authorship of the Torah is traditionally attributed. Also called Moshe Rabbeinu in Hebrew Moses was, according to biblical texts, a...
, part of the tomb of Pope Julius II.
Originally intended for
St. Peter's BasilicaThe Papal Basilica of Saint Peter , officially known in Italian as the ' and commonly known as St. Peter's Basilica, is located within the Vatican City. St. Peter's Basilica has the largest interior of any Christian church in the world, holding 60,000 people. It is the symbolic "Mother church" of...
, "Moses" and the tomb were instead placed in the minor church of
San Pietro in VincoliSan Pietro in Vincoli is a basilica in Rome, best known for being the home of Michelangelo's magnificent statue of Moses, part of the tomb of Pope Julius II.-History:...
on the Esquiline in
RomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated municipality , with over 2.7 million residents in , while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat to be 3.46 million. The metropolitan area of Rome is estimated by OECD to have a population of 3.7 million...
after the pope's death. This church was patronised by the della Rovere family from which Julius came, and he had been titular cardinal there.
The
statueA statue is a sculpture in the round representing a person or persons, an animal, or an event, normally full-length, as opposed to a bust, and at least close to life-size, or larger...
depicts Moses with horns on his head. This is believed to be because of a mistranslation of Exodus 34:29-35 by St
JeromeSaint Jerome was a Christian priest and apologist. He was the son of Eusebius, of the city of Strido, which was on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia...
. Moses is actually described as having "rays of the skin of his face", which Jerome in the
VulgateThe Vulgate is an early 5th-century Latin version of the Bible, largely the result of the labors of Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 to make a revision of old Latin translations...
had translated as "horns" (
See HaloA halo is a ring of light that surrounds a person in art. They have been used in the iconography of many religions to indicate holy or sacred figures, and have at various periods also been used in images of rulers or heroes...
). The mistake in translation is possible because the wordage can mean either "radiated (light)" or "grew horns".
The tomb of Julius II, a colossal structure that would have given Michelangelo the room he needed for his superhuman, tragic beings, became one of the great disappointments of Michelangelo's life when the pope, for unexplained reasons, interrupted the commission, possibly because funds had to be diverted for
Bramante'sDonato Bramante was an Italian architect, who introduced the Early Renaissance style to Milan and the High Renaissance style to Rome, where his most famous design was St...
rebuilding of St. Peter's. The original project called for a freestanding, three-level structure with some 40 statues. After the pope's death in 1513, the scale of the project was reduced step-by-step until, in 1542, a final contract specified a simple wall tomb with fewer than one-third of the originally planned figures.
The spirit of the tomb may be summed up in the figure of "Moses", which was completed during one of the sporadic resumptions of the work in 1513. Meant to be seen from below, and balanced with seven other massive forms related in spirit to it, the "Moses" now, in its comparatively paltry setting, can hardly have its full impact.
In his essay entitled
The Moses of Michelangelo, Sigmund Freud, along with several well-respected experts, associates this work with the
first set of Tables described in Exodus 32: (19) “And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.”
A more recent view, put forward by Malcolm MacMillan and Peter Swales in their essay entitled
Observations from the Refuse-Heap: Freud, Michelangelo’s Moses, and Psychoanalysis, relates the sculpture to a
second set of Tables and the event mentioned in Exodus 33: (22) “And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by:” and (23) And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen."
This event is described further in Exodus 34: (4) “And he hewed two tables of stone like unto the first; and Moses rose up early in the morning, and went up unto mount Sinai, as the LORD had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tables of stone. (5) And the LORD descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. (6) And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, (7) Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. (8) And Moses made haste, and bowed his head toward the earth, and worshipped.”
It would seem as though Freud's atheistic views prevented him from seeing the spiritual content Michelangelo incorporated into this work of art. Nevertheless, he notes the following: “As our eyes travel down it the figure exhibits three distinct emotional strata. The lines of the face reflect the feelings which have won ascendancy; the middle of the figure shows the traces of suppressed movement; and the foot still retains the attitude of the projected action.
It is as though the controlling influence had proceeded downwards from above."
Michelangelo felt that this was his most life-like creation. Legend has it that upon its completion he struck the right knee commanding, "now speak!" as he felt that life was the only thing left inside the marble. There is a scar on the knee thought to be the mark of Michelangelo's hammer.
Other sculptures for Julius II tomb were:
External links