How Moses got his horns
QUESTION Why does the statue of Moses by Michelangelo
have horns? In the Moses sculpture (dated 1513/1515) in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, the angry Patriarch has seen his people worshipping the Golden Calf and he is about to throw down the stone tablets with the ten Commandments, which God had given him.
It has been widely praised. the French author Stendhal wrote: ‘those who have not seen this statue cannot realise the full power of sculpture.’
Sigmund Freud spent three weeks in 1913 analysing the sculpture. he wrote, anonymously, a famous essay in 1914 entitled the Moses Of Michelangelo, in which he attempted to reconstruct the precise action that the sculpture depicted the Jewish law-giver performing.
Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner believed the horns were a depiction of Moses’s power: ‘Michelangelo sets before us his Moses as representative of his age so completely penetrated with force of will that he can put upon him these extraordinary horns; and we are quite prepared to believe in them.’
however, the horns are thought to have been the result of a mistranslation. the depiction of a horned Moses stems from the description of his face as cornuta (‘horned’) in the Latin Vulgate translation of the passage from exodus in which Moses returns to the people after receiving the Commandments for the second time.
the Douay-Rheims Bible translates the Vulgate as: ‘And when Moses came down from the Mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord.’
this was Saint Jerome’s effort to translate faithfully the difficult original hebrew Masoretic text, which uses the term karan (based on the root, keren, which often means ‘horn’). the term is now interpreted to mean ‘shining’ or ‘emitting rays’.
Depictions of a horned Moses were commonplace across the Western medieval world. examples include the Statue of Moses from St Mary’s Abbey, York (c.11501200), now in the Yorkshire museum; a fresco of God giving the ten Commandments to a horned Moses in St Andrew’s Church in Westhall, Suffolk; Moses with horns in the Chapel at new College, Oxford; Claus Sluter’s depiction on the Well of Moses in Dijon (1395-1403); and the Moses statue on the exterior of the Vilnius cathedral in Lithuania.
Joseph Rees, Leeds.
QUESTION What caused the financial crisis of 1720?
Is it true that Parliament debated a resolution that bankers be sewn into sacks filled with poisonous snakes and thrown into the Thames? At the beginning of the 18th century, many governments and businessmen in europe were involved in large-scale banking and credit with the aims of creating ventures and paying off government debt (mostly caused by expensive wars).
In england, a substantial amount of government debt was held through chartered companies that had been given monopolies in certain activities in return for loaning money to the government when shares in the company were bought.
One was the east India Company; another, the South Sea Company, founded in 1711, had a monopoly on British trade with South America.
Many similar companies were set up throughout europe by business and governments and became so popular by their massive promises of profits to come that even when their stock was overvalued eight to ten times its original worth, investors still kept buying and they became ‘bubbles’.
As with the late eighties property booms, the bubbles eventually burst in 1720, leaving people desperate to sell stock at whatever price they could. the markets all but collapsed and financial ruin came for many. the South Sea Company continued until the mid-19th century.
John Bartlett, London. At A tense meeting of the Commons on December 8, 1720, with the Bank of england’s proposed rescue of the South Sea Company hanging in the balance, Whig politician Robert Molesworth, 1st Viscount Molesworth, rose to speak.
he and his grandson, Robert Molesworth, had invested heavily in the company and the historian and political theorist recommended a classical punishment for the bankers and company directors.
Many modern articles have made specific reference to snakes, but this wasn’t quite the case.
the exchange went: ‘ he owned it had been by some suggested that there was no law to punish the directors of the South Sea Company . . . but that, in his opinion, they ought, on this occasion, to follow the example of the ancient Romans, who having no law against parricide [killing of parents or another close relative], because their legislators supposed no son could be so unnaturally wicked as to embrue his hands in his father’s blood, made one to punish so heinous a crime, as soon as it happened to be committed; and adjudged the guilty wretch to be thrown alive, sewed up in a sack, into the tyber.’
he concluded ‘ that as he looked upon the contrivers and executers of the villainous South Sea scheme as the parricides of their country, he should be satisfied to see them undergo the same punishment’. he was alluding to the Roman punishment of poena cullei — ‘punishment of the sack’.
In emperor Justinian’s law text, the punishment for parricide is ‘the criminal is sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper and an ape, and in this dismal prison is thrown into the sea or a river, according to the nature of the locality, in order that even before death he may begin to be deprived of the enjoyment of the elements, the air being denied him while alive, and interment in the earth when dead.’
S. P. Cooper, Chester, Cheshire.
QUESTION Why were there allegations that Miss World 1965 was fixed? Further to the earlier answer, I can state categorically that Miss World 1965 wasn’t fixed. I was a steward for Mecca at that event, held at the Royal Albert hall, and remember that Julia Morley, the producer of the contest, was furious about a Miss UK winning twice in succession — Lesley Langley following Ann Sidney.
I also remember meeting up again with Press photographer and Fleet Street legend Monty Fresco, whom I’d met four years earlier when, on behalf of Butlin’s, I was compere and producer for the area finals of the holiday Princess Contest in which Ann Sidney was an entrant.
Terry Herbert, West Kingsdown, Kent.
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