MOSES

Figure for the Tomb of Julius II (1513-1516).

San Pietro-in-Vinculi, Rome.]

The Moses is a supernatural and savage apparition half beast, half god.
Pagan? Christian? No one knows. Two horns pierce the narrow skull, a
flowing beard descends from his face to his knees like a parasitical
vine attached to a great tree. He seems calm, but in his terrible jaw
with close-shut teeth and projecting lower lip is wrath which shatters
and crushes like the first chords of the overture to "Coriolanus." An
implacable and murderous force, a tumult of rage and contempt wars in
the silence of that arrogant being, with his huge bulk, his knotted
arms--less brutal than those of most of Michelangelo's heroes, and with
strong and beautiful hands--and left leg bent ready to rise. The dress
is a barbarous one. No other work of Michelangelo is as completely
finished. We feel that he had lived with it more than thirty years
without being willing to let it go. He could see himself in it as in a
superb mirror which gave him back the image that he had divined of his
own soul. For the Moses is not only the most perfect artistic expression
of his genius, but also its highest moral expression. Nowhere else has
he so completely realised the majestic balance of a violent and
passionate soul controlled by an iron will. Everywhere else passion is
let loose and the human being is given into its hands. Here the savage
elements are in suspense, ready to fuse. It is a thunder-cloud charged
with lightning.

Beside that superhuman creation rich with the whole life of
Michelangelo, the two gracious figures of Leah and Rachel, the work of
his old age, seem a little cold and affected.

"I seemed in a dream to see a lady, young and beautiful, going through a
meadow, gathering flowers, and singing she was saying, 'Let him know,
whoso asks my name, that I am Leah, and I go moving my fair hands around
to make myself a garland. To please me at the glass here I adorn me, but
my sister Rachel never withdraws from her mirror, and sits all day. She
is as fain to look with her fair eyes as I to adorn me with my hands.
Her seeing, and me doing, satisfies.'"[83]

The perfume of these lovely verses of Dante penetrates Michelangelo's
two statues, which are rather apart from the rest of his work. If it
were not for the largeness of their conception they would recall by
their "morbidezza" and their cold grace the style of Civitale and
Rossellino. Michelangelo see