Whited sepulchre

‘How often’, wrote Sigmund Freud in 1914, ‘have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the church stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the heroic glance.’ The gaze that the founder of psychoanalysis struggled to withstand belonged to Michelangelo’s Moses, centrepiece of the tomb of Julius II in the basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli.

Michelangelo’s Moses has indeed a look of formidable authority. The prophet possesses, in addition, the physique of a body-builder, a beard that cascades like Niagara Falls and a pair of knees for which the best adjective is also ‘heroic’. Yet, despite its power, this statue was — for its creator — just one element in an agonising, slow-motion disaster. In the life of Michelangelo by Condivi — something close to a modern ‘as-told-to’ biography — this is described as ‘the tragedy of the tomb’.