Moses

Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475-1564)
Moses (begun 1513, completed 1542)
Marble stutue, 235 cm. in height
San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome

This magnificent sculpture was executed as one of six that were to adorn the tomb of Pope Julius II, a project Michelangelo never completed. The marble sculpture appears to depict Moses with horns on his head, though some modern artists and historians claim that there were never intended to be horns. The depiction of a horned Moses was the normal medieval Western depiction of Moses, based on the description of Moses’ face as “cornuta” (“horned”) in the Latin Vulgate translation of Exodus. The Douay-Rheims Bible translates the Vulgate as, “And when Moses came down from the mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord.” This was, however, a mistranslation of the original Hebrew Masoretic text which uses a term equivalent to “radiant”, suggesting an effect like a halo. The Greek Septuagint translated the verse as “Moses knew not that the appearance of the skin of his face was glorified.” The church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch comments about this: “Jerome [the translator of the Old Testament into Latin], mistaking particles of Hebrew, had turned this into a description of Moses wearing a pair of horns — and so the Lawgiver is frequently depicted in the art of the Western Church, even after humanists had gleefully removed the horns from the text of Exodus.”

Interpretations
In his essay entitled “The Moses of Michelangelo,” the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, along with several well-respected experts, associates this work with the first set of Tables described in Exodus 32: “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.” This event is described further in Exodus 34: “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. And the LORD descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, 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. And Moses made haste, and bowed his head toward the earth, and worshipped.”