Michelangelo’s marble sculpture Moses depicts the biblical lawgiver Moses seated with horns on his head.
Michelangelo created the statue between 1513 and 1515 for the tomb of Pope Julius II in Rome. It forms part of the tomb monument in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, where it remains. The figure is larger than life-size and is shown holding the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.
The horns come from a Latin translation of the Book of Exodus. That translation used wording suggesting that Moses’s face had horns after speaking with God. The Hebrew text is generally understood to describe rays of light, but Michelangelo followed the established Latin visual tradition.
Moses was originally intended to be part of a much larger papal tomb project. The reduced final monument contains fewer figures than Michelangelo first planned, but Moses remains its central artistic attraction.