Why did Michelangelo sculpt Moses with horns?

Summer can be a good time to discover the magic of art, visiting museums, art galleries or churches and historic buildings. If you are not a big fan or feel like a fish out of water among paintings, frescoes and sculptures, Costantino D'Orazio comes to your aid with his recent "Detective of art" (Piemme, 2024, Euro 17, 90, pp. 144). It is a playful and entertaining manual for young and passionate art investigators in which to find the clues to recognize thirty characters without fail, to be able to read the gestures of the protagonists of the paintings and grasp the details, in an artistic journey as exciting as a yellow: because every work of art is a mystery to be revealed and not just something wonderful to observe.

Even today, works of art often have a strong political, ideological and social connotation and are created to convey a message. With a similar intent, the great pictorial and sculptural cycles were created in past centuries. In fact, very few of our ancestors knew how to read and to spread ideas and messages to an illiterate public we resorted to images, transforming them into actual books made of color and stone that told, for example, the sacred story. In short, art had to amaze and fascinate, but above all educate.

Let's simply think of the pictorial or sculptural decorations of the many churches in our country. These decorations were designed to accompany the faithful on a path of spiritual growth. Therefore the distribution of the subjects inside and outside the building had to comply with very specific rules. The faithful could mainly observe scenes from the Bible or moments from the lives of the saints that were easily identifiable, both because they returned in the words of the preachers and in the homilies of the priests (even if the masses were held in Latin, a language now understood by few) , both because they were episodes that were part of the common heritage of women and men of the past, and also simply because they were narrated by storytellers on the side of the roads.

Today most of us have lost this religious and cultural background and observe the masterpieces of painting and sculpture without fully understanding the importance of the message they convey. D'Orazio offers in a light and enjoyable way a basic grammar for learning a new language: that of art. And it offers us the possibility of revealing real mysteries, such as: "Why did Michelangelo sculpt his famous Moses with horns on his head?". Not a trivial question because Moses was a man of God and we usually associate horns with the devil. Well, it was all the result of a mistake. In a translation of the Bible which was widespread in the sixteenth century, in the verses which narrated Moses' descent from Mount Sinai after receiving the tablets of the law, the Hebrew word karan, which means "rays", was confused with the term keren, " horn". So Moses had to be depicted with light rays on his head after meeting God, not horned.