IL MOSE’ di MICHELANGELO Tomb of Pope Julius II in St Peter in Chains

Описание: IL MOSE’ di MICHELANGELO a san Pietro in Vincoli - Tomb of Pope Julius II in St Peter in Chains, Rome
Tomb of Pope Julius II
The monumental Tomb of Pope Julius II, as mentioned, is shoehorned into the right hand end of the transept in 1545 where it is completely out of scale. To be fair, it was never intended to be here but in the new St Peter's Basilica. Further, the present wall monument was a massively downgraded version of an original freestanding tomb project which, when mooted in 1505, would have had about forty statues by Michelangelo.
Elsewhere, there are two sculptures of Slaves at the Louvre in Paris, France, four unfinished Slaves at the Accademia Gallery in Florence and an unfinished Victory at the Palazzo Vecchio also in Florence.
Here, there are only seven full-figure statues, plus four bearded hero-caryatids, and scholarly argument is continuous about how much of them are the result of the master's own chisel. The summary given here is a fair consensus; since the arguments are based on stylistic grounds, there can be no firm conclusion.
The most famous work of art here is obviously Michelangelo's Moses (c.1513-15), in the central position. The patriarch is shown having just sat down to teach after bringing the Tablets of the Law down from his interview with God on Mount Sinai. The little horns on his head are a result of an early mistranslation of the Hebrew, in which the word for "rays of light" was rendered as "horns". For centuries after it was erected, members of the Jewish community used to come here in great numbers to venerate the statue.
There is dispute about the full authorship of the other statues. To the left of Moses is Rachel, and to the right Leah, the sisters whom the patriarch Jacob (otherwise named Israel) married. These are considered to be by Michelangelo, but they are not nearly as good as Moses and so have been claimed as being of his immediate school with the drapery by him. (To be fair, genius cannot be expected to be consistent as any Italian football fan will tell you.)
Above, in the second storey, Pope Julius is depicted reclining on a sarcophagus in the Etruscan funerary style with the Madonna and Child above him, a Sibyl to the left and a Prophet to the right. The youthfulness of the prophet hints at Daniel, and this statue and the Sibyl are ascribed to Raffaello da Montelupo. The Madonna is ascribed to Alessandro Scherano. The pope's effigy was the subject of a debate in 1999, when the tomb was restored. Before then it was ascribed to Tommaso Boscalo and often scorned by art critics ("pathetic" was one word used), but Antonio Forcellino argued after a close examination that Michelangelo carved the face.
(WikiFandom)