page_title: Moses (Michelangelo)
section_title: Horns
hierarchical_section_title: Moses (Michelangelo) / Interpretations / Horns
caption_attribution_description: English: This scene from Walters manuscript W.106 depicts a moment when the Israelites were in the desert after their escape from Egypt. Moses (shown here with horns, a sign of his encounter with divinity) had been on Mount Sinai, alone, receiving instructions from God. The Israelites strayed from faith in God in his absence
context_page_description: Moses 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 chapter 34 of Exodus in the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible used at that time.
context_section_description: Following the iconographic convention common in Latin Christianity, the statue has two horns on its head.
  The depiction of a horned Moses stems from the description of Moses' face as "cornuta" ("horned") in the Latin Vulgate translation of the passage found at Exodus chapter 34, specifically verses 29, 30 and 35, in which Moses returns to the people after receiving the commandments for the second time. The Douay-Rheims Bible translates the Vulgate as, "And when Moses came down from the Mount Sinai, he held the two tablets of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord." 
  This was Jerome's effort to faithfully translate the difficult, original Hebrew text, which uses the term קָרַ֛ן, qāran (based on the root,  קָ֫רֶן qeren, which often means "horn"); the term is now interpreted to mean "shining" or "emitting rays" (somewhat like a horn). 
  Although some historians believe that Jerome made an outright error, Jerome himself appears to have seen qeren as a metaphor for "glorified", based on other commentaries he wrote, including one on Ezekiel, where he wrote that Moses' face had "become 'glorified', or as it says in the Hebrew, 'horned'." The Greek Septuagint, which Jerome also had available, translated the verse as "Moses knew not that the appearance of the skin of his face was glorified." In general medieval theologians and scholars understood that Jerome had intended to express a glorification of Moses' face, by his use of the Latin word for "horned." The understanding that the original Hebrew was difficult and was not likely to mean "horns" persisted into and through the Renaissance.
  Although Jerome completed the Vulgate in the late 4th century, the first known applications of the literal language of the Vulgate in art are found in an English illustrated book written in the vernacular, that was created around 1050: the Aelfric Paraphrase of the Pentateuch and Joshua. For the next 150 years or so, evidence for further images of a horned Moses is sparse. Afterward, such images proliferated and can be found, for example, in the stained glass windows at the Chartres Cathedral, Sainte-Chapelle, and Notre Dame, even as Moses continued to be depicted many times without horns. In the 16th century, the prevalence of depictions of a horned Moses steeply diminished.
  In Christian art of the Middle Ages, Moses is depicted wearing horns and without them; sometimes in glory, as a prophet and precursor of Jesus, but also in negative contexts, especially about Pauline contrasts between faith and law - the iconography was not black and white.
  The depiction with horns is first found in 11th-century England.  Melinkoff (1970) speculated that while the horns of Moses in origin were in no way associated with those of the Devil, the horns may nevertheless have developed a negative connotation with the development of anti-Jewish sentiment in the early modern period. 
  A book published in 2008 advanced a theory that the "horns" on Michelangelo's statue were never meant to be seen and that it is wrong to interpret them as horns: "[The statue] never had horns. The artist had planned Moses as a masterpiece not only of sculpture but also of special optical effects worthy of any Hollywood movie. For this reason, the piece had to be elevated and facing straight forward, looking in the direction of the front door of the basilica. The two protrusions on the head would have been invisible to the viewer looking up from the floor below — the only thing that would have been seen was the light reflected off of them." This interpretation has been contested.
caption: Illustration of Moses with horns from a 13th-century illuminated manuscript.
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