Moses, from the tomb of Pope Julius II, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, c.1513-1515

From Giorgio Vasari’s Life of Michelangelo: “Michelangelo finished the Moses in marble, a statue of five braccia, unequalled by any modern or ancient work. Seated in a serious attitude, he rests with one arm on the tables, and with the other holds his long glossy beard, the hairs, so difficult to render in sculpture, being so soft and downy that it seems as if the iron chisel must have become a brush. The beautiful face, like that of a saint and mighty prince, seems as one regards it to need the veil to cover it, so splendid and shining does it appear, and so well has the artist presented in the marble the divinity with which God had endowed that holy countenance. The draperies fall in graceful folds, the muscles of the arms and bones of the hands are of such beauty and perfection, as are the legs and knees, the feet being adorned with excellent shoes, that Moses may now be called the friend of God more than ever, since God has permitted his body to be prepared for the resurrection before the others by the hand of Michelangelo. The Jews still go every Saturday in troops to visit and adore it as a divine, not a human thing."

Michelangelo’s Moses undoubtedly ranks alongside his Pietà and the David as one of the master’s greatest works of sculpture. A chip on the knee is said to mark the place where, upon completing his great work and seeing the life he had brought forth from a block of Carrara marble, he struck the sculpture with his hammer and commanded it to speak.

Originally intended as but one of forty statues to adorn a three-tiered freestanding mausoleum commissioned by Pope Julius II as his own tomb, to be completed by Michelangelo in only five years as the focal point for the new Basilica of St Peter, the Moses would instead became the centerpiece of a far more humble wall monument in San Pietro in Vincoli, one of three (out of just seven) designed by Michelangelo for the setting, and the only one to have been sculpted entirely by the master’s own hand. The tomb would take not five years but forty (and then only after considerable legal battles between Michelangelo and the della Rovere family)- the remains to whom it is dedicated are in fact interred in the floor of St Peter’s, marked by a simple stone slab.

The Moses is sometimes believed to be an idealized portrait of the della Rovere Pope himself. Of all the many patronages Michelangelo enjoyed that of Julius was by far the most turbulent. Julius overloaded Michelangelo with demands and projects, variously threatening, berating, even physically beating him, but always pushing the limitations of Michelangelo’s skills in diverse mediums further while at times testing the limits of the artist’s own sanity. Akin to the bronze statue of Julius which Michelangelo had previously made for the cathedral in Bologna (torn down in a revolt against the papal government shortly after and recast into a cannon), Moses is here seated in a regal posture, an embodiment of authority- as Vasari says, “a saint and mighty prince”- and is possessed of all the tension and ferocity attributed to the Warrior Pope. Even the beard could reflect that worn by Julius during his war with Bologna. Mutually contentious to the end, the melancholic artist and the choleric pontiff had nonetheless acquired a mutual respect, and the Moses is very much a personal tribute of Michelangelo to the greatest of his benefactors.