Moses

The Latin Bible sent Moses down from Sinai with a horned face. Jerome had taken a Hebrew word meaning shone, or sent out rays, and rendered it cornuta, horned, and painters and sculptors followed him for centuries. Michelangelo carved the horns around 1515. By the time Dolci made this small canvas in Florence, about 1650, scholars had long known the rendering was wrong, and the horns had mostly turned into light. That is what sits on this forehead, two pale rays in exactly the place horns used to grow, marking him out as the one who speaks for God. Everything else is the language Dolci used for saints in ecstasy, the eyes lifted, the mouth slightly open, an old face brought close. The picture is small, 40 by 30 centimetres. In 1691 it was listed among the pictures of the dowager Grand Duchess Vittoria at her villa of Poggio Imperiale, on the hill south of Florence.