Without Lifting A Finger

The Moses (c. 1513–1515) is a sculpture by the Italian High Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti, housed in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome . Commissioned in 1505 by Pope Julius II for his tomb , it depicts the Biblical figure Moses with horns on his head, based on a description in the Vulgate , the Latin translation of the Bible used at that time. Description 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. [2] 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 . [3] 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 th...

Michelangelo's Moses statue (1515) , a photo by Niroshan Sothilingam on Flickr. I was looking for something else (cats in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome) and found "my Moses" (too lazy to digitalize and post it so this one is surrogate) from circa 1992. I believe the "horns" are due to a mistranslation of the Hebrew text. When I was there the church was under repair, scaffolding and draping canvas everywhere, and it was very dark: had to put a few lire into the box for lighting.