Paul Wiggins 🍺

If you look closely at the forearm of Michelangelo’s Moses, you’ll find a tiny muscle that only tightens when you lift your little finger, and since Moses has his little finger raised, Michelangelo carved that muscle tensed beneath the marble... He poured that extraordinary knowledge of the human body into a statue carved between 1513 and 1515 for one of the most ambitious projects of his life: the tomb of Pope Julius II. The horns on his head, which surprise almost everyone who sees them, come from the Latin Bible of the time. In the Book of Exodus, the Hebrew word describing Moses’ face as he came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments is usually translated today as “shining,” but it is related to the Hebrew word for “horn,” and Saint Jerome’s Latin translation rendered the passage as “his face was horned.” By Michelangelo’s time, artists across Europe had been showing Moses with horns for centuries, and he followed that long tradition. Today Moses sits in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, looking so alive that it’s easy to forget he’s made of stone. Michelangelo seems to have felt the same way: according to a famous story, when he finished the statue, he was so proud of how real it looked that he struck it on the knee with his hammer and shouted, “Why don’t you speak?” I’ve stood in front of him, and I can tell you that in person it really does feel as if he might answer at any moment…