Moses (Michelangelo)

Lore & Background

Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to build his tomb in 1505, and it was finally completed in 1545; Julius II died in 1513. The initial design was massive and called for over 40 statues. The statue of Moses would have been placed on a tier about 3.74 meters high, opposite a figure of St. Paul. In the final design, the statue of Moses sits in the center of the bottom tier. Giorgio Vasari wrote that Michelangelo finished the Moses in marble, a statue of five braccia, unequaled by any modern or ancient work. He described the beard as so soft and downy that the iron chisel seemed to have become a brush, and noted that Rome's Jewish population visited it every Saturday to adore it as a divine thing.

Reader's Guide

Sigmund Freud's interpretations of the statue from 1916 are particularly well-known. Some interpretations, including Freud's, note a demonic force but also a beautiful figure, with emotional intensity as God's word is revealed. Freud argued that Michelangelo goes beyond mere skills to provoke curiosity, asking why Moses plays with his hair and why he is presented with horns and flowing hair. In his 1914 essay, Freud associated the statue with the moment Moses descends from the mountain and finds the Hebrew people worshipping the Golden Calf, describing Moses in a complex psychological state of frozen wrath and pain. Another view, by Malcolm Macmillan and Peter J. Swales, relates the sculpture to the second set of Tables and events in Exodus 33 and 34, arguing the statue depicts the moment Moses sees God. Some scholars believe the use of horns may hold an antisemitic implication, while others hold it is simply a convention based on a translation error.

Did You Know?

• The statue's horns are based on a description in chapter 34 of Exodus in the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible.
• Sigmund Freud spent three weeks in 1913 trying to figure out the sculpture's emotional effect.
• According to Vasari, Rome's Jewish population adopted the statue as their own and visited it every Saturday.
• The statue was originally designed to be placed on a tier about 3.74 meters high, opposite a figure of St. Paul.