Testamento e Morte de Moisés

Long before Michelangelo climbed his scaffold, the Sistine Chapel already had walls to fill. In 1481 Pope Sixtus IV brought a team of painters down from Florence, part of a fragile peace he was patching up with Lorenzo de' Medici, and set them to line the chapel with the lives of Moses and Christ. This fresco comes from that first campaign, painted around 1482, most of it now given to Bartolomeo della Gatta rather than his better-known partner Luca Signorelli. It shows the last day of Moses at the age of 120, handing his staff of command to a kneeling Joshua while, further back, he climbs the mountain to die in sight of a land he was never allowed to enter. At the right he stands before the crowd one last time, faint rays of light rising from his head.