Rome tours: michelangelo's moses in the Freud's opinion

ROME TOURS: MICHELANGELO'S MOSES IN THE FREUD'S OPINION

Near the Colosseum, there is the church of saint Peter in chains that contains not only the chains that tied saint Peter, but also the statue of the Moises, carved by Michelangelo. Freud approached Michelangelo's Moses as a frequent visitor to the church of saint Peter in chains and a longtime admirer of both the statue and its subject.
In the Moses essay, Freud summarizes the two main vies of Michelangelo's Moses as follows:

1 ) God entrusted Moses with the tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai. When Moses came down from the mountain, he saw the Hebrews worshipping a golden calf: their pagan sentiments aroused his anger, and, at the moment represented in the statue, Moses is about to rise up and smash the Tablets.

2) Moses is not about to rise up at all; rather to preserve a higher purpose, he has overcome his rage, which is both expressed and suppressed through muscle tension. Intellect and civilization thus triumph over primitive impulse.

According to the former reading, Michelangelo follows the biblical text and depicts a specific narrative moment in the life of Moses.
Reviewing the statue Freud identifies three layers of emotion. In the foot he detects the residue of impulsive anger. The relation of the right hand to the beard and the torso indicates the suppression of the anger which is further counteracted by the calm of the left hand. Finally, the face expresses the will to control.
By the combination of these emotional layers, Michelangelo creates a Moses who stands for intellectual control over the fisical expression of rage.

In Moses analysis Freud synthesizes the two main views of Michelangelo:

a timeless character study
a specific moment in time.

From his discussion of the sculpture, Freud relates form and iconography to psychology. He attempts to reconstruct Michelangelo's motives for the Moses iconography,considering the artist's patron, Julis II, and the fact that the pope commissioned the statue for his own tomb. Pope Julius, Freud ponts out, was a man of enormous ambition whose grand purpose was the unity of Italy under the papal authority. He was impatient and, like the biblical Moses, willing to resort to violence to achieve his ends. Likewise, Michelangelo was aware of his own violent streak, which often erupted in impulsive behaviour.
According to Freud, therefore, Michelangelo created a new kind of Moses as a reproach to Julius and as warning to himself.

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