Michelangelo’s Moses
Anthony Stadlen
[Letter in The Guardian (Review) p. 23, 15 June 2002]
Copyright © Anthony Stadlen 2002, 2020
Copyright © Anthony Stadlen 2002, 2020
Jonathan Jones’s ‘Portrait of the Week: Michelangelo’s Moses’ is a portrait of nothing other than Freud’s fantasies (Review, June 8). The very first sentence of Mr Jones’s account of ‘distinguishing features’ is a repetition of Freud’s first howler: ‘Moses’s right hand protects the stone tablets bearing the Commandments.’ But there are no Commandments written on the bare rectangular tablets Michelangelo depicts!
The ‘horns’ on Moses’s head, which Mr Jones calls ‘a conventional attribute of Moses’, are the beams of light, for which the same Hebrew word ‘qeren’ is used [as] for ‘horn’, and which the Bible clearly states Moses radiated after he had seen God on Mount Sinai, before God rewrote the Commandments on the second set of tablets. Freud has confused Moses’s first and second ascents. It was on the first that he came down to find the children of Israel worshipping the Golden Calf, and on the second that he saw God’s passing and radiated ‘horns’ of light.
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Anthony Stadlen
Former research fellow, the Freud Museum. London
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