Moses: When Marble Led Me Back to the Word

In the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome the narrator stands before Michelangelo's Moses as an architect, a writer and a Muslim who knows that Moses, peace be upon him, is greater than anything marble can contain. He traces the statue back to Pope Julius II's grand tomb project and to the stone that was mass and resistance before the chisel, then leaves Rome in imagination for the desert, the distant fire, the staff in Moses' right hand, and Moses entering Pharaoh's palace with a word and his brother Aaron beside him. As an architect who has spent his life thinking about passage, he sees the parted sea as the greatest passage no architect built, reads the tablets as the most important element of the sculpture, admires an anger held under control in a figure about to rise, and explains that the horns come from an old Latin reading of a verse in Exodus about a radiant face. He marks the boundary where art must stop, since God spoke to Moses directly, lists the Moses the marble cannot show, the infant on the river, the shepherd and the husband, and insists that he is the one who bears witness and the statue is not. Imagining a mosque inspired by the story as a journey from a narrow entrance to a pool of light, he returns to the unmoved statue and finds the Moses he was seeking in guidance, far from the marble.