An honest mistake!

I share my birthday, 6th March along with Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564).

Michelangelo thought of himself first as a sculptor, although he was an architect, painter, poet and engineer. For Michelangelo sculpting became the process in unravelling the Idea – the image that is locked in the stone – by removing the excess stone until the mass has given away to living form. The eye guided him unlike his contemporaries who painstakingly abide by mathematical methods such as PHI (1.618) in order to reach beautiful symmetrical proportions.

Dan Brown’s contemporary novel – The Da Vinci Code – elaborates on the number one-point-six-one-eight as the Divine Proportion that guided many Renaissance artists. Describing Leonardo’s famous male nude – The Vitruvian Man – who ‘was the first to show that the human body is literally made of building blocks whose proportions ratios always equal PHI.’(Dan Brown ‘The Da Vinci Code’ (Soft cover) p. 133/593) Dan begs his readers to put this principle to the test. “Measure the distance from the tip of your head to the floor. Then divide that by the distance from your belly button to the floor. Guess what number you get?”

Michelangelo according to ‘Art Through The Ages’ said the following: “Measure and proportion should be ‘kept in the eyes’. ‘It was necessary to keep one’s compass in one’s eyes and not in the hand, for the hand execute, but the eyes judges.’ Thus, he would set aside Vitruvius, Alberti, Leonardo, Albrecht Durer, and others who tirelessly sought the perfect measure.”

Michelangelo’s theory to be guided by the eye compliments Biblical text. He absorbs himself with much Biblical subject matter during his career as an artist. “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:22,23 NIV)

The figure of Moses which Michelangelo sculpted was summed up by one writer “if this titan ever rose the world will fly apart!” Michelangelo could not betray the eye with unrealistic features. To the eye it appears that Moses’ ‘muscle bulge, the veins swell, the great legs begin slowly to move.’ However, amongst all the realness something odd protrudes from Moses’ head – horns! To the modern eye it seems that the artist bedevilled Moses! Even so, Michelangelo had little time for symbolic gestures; he sculpted realistic figures for the Catholic Church! Surely, the Pope would never allow a sinister plot portraying Moses with horns to look preposterous! Nevertheless, like Dan Brown novels there is a startling explanation, which will clear up the matter, why Renaissance artists sculpted and painted Moses with horns!

The horns have no symbolic meaning but derived from an error in translation. In Moses’ meeting with God his face is described as glowing in Exodus 34.

We find in the Hebraic text, which consists only of consonants and no vowels, the word “KRN”. When the text has been given vowels between the two consonants early translators place two “E’s” between the consonants. The word “KRN” becomes “K-E-R-E-N” that means HORN! Moses’ descend after being with God startled onlookers because of the horns on his head! Overtime this conclusion was taken up and become part of the Vulgate. The Vulgate becomes the point of reference for many renaissance painters and sculptors depicting Moses with horns. However, later scholars realise as more scripts came to light, that the word “KEREN” should have been translated as “K-A-R-A-N”, meaning GLOWING! Suddenly, the Biblical text becomes clearer and meaningful. Moses face was glowing after his descend being with God! The mistake had been rectified, nevertheless, Michelangelo’s horned Moses remains a language error immortalised in marble!

An honest mistake!