Artist: Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), born in Tuscany and educated in Florence, undertook his most ambitious work in Rome for Julius II, a warrior pope whose terrible temper did not exclude a sensitivity to art. He commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling and to sculpt his tomb.
Subject: Moses, the law- giver, who led the Jews out of Egypt and brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai.
Distinguishing features: Moses's right hand protects the stone tablets bearing the Commandments; his left hand, veins throbbing, muscles tense, appears to be holding back from violent action. When he came down from Mount Sinai, Moses found his people worshipping the Golden Calf - the false idol they had made. His anger defies the prison of stone, the limits of the sculptor's art. Few can resist the impression of a real mind, real emotions, in the figure that glares from his marble seat.
Today, he glares at the tourists who mob the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. He outfaces them, just as he outfaced Sigmund Freud, who spent three weeks in 1913 trying to figure out the sculpture's emotional effect. Moses's vitality has made this work popular since the 16th century; according to Vasari, Rome's Jewish population adopted the statue as their own.
Its power must have something to do with the rendition of things that should be impossible to depict in stone; most quirkily, the beard - so ropy and smoky, its coils given fantastic, snaking life. But where others might astonish us with technique, Michelangelo goes beyond this, leading us from formal to intellectual surprise, making us wonder why Moses fondles his beard, why Michelangelo has used this river of hair - in combination with the horns that were a conventional attribute of Moses - to give him an inhuman, demonic aspect.
Freud saw this Moses as a heroic image of self-control, a quality for which neither Michelangelo nor Julius II - for whose tomb he created this figure - were noted. The rows between them during the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling - not to mention the prolonged work on the Pope's tomb - are the founding legend of the modern artist.
After years of dallying, and after the death of Julius, Michelangelo completed the tomb - on a smaller scale than originally planned. You can't help wondering if in making this angry, intense Moses the central element of the tomb, Michelangelo was paying him a backhanded tribute - creating an icon of wrath, an embodiment of righteous fury. Perhaps as he himself aged, he understood the Pope better and, like Moses, contemplated the crowd with contempt.
Where is it? San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome.