Moses

Between 1550 and 1555 Bartolomeo Ammannati was resident in Rome. There he came into contact with Michelangelo, whose works he had already studied assiduously in Florence. His admiration for the master, and the influence he had on his sculptural works, led not least to the repeated attribution to Ammannati of the statue of Moses in the Bargello. This marble figure, 60 cm high, is a copy in reduced size of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses, which dominates the funerary monument of Pope Julius II in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli. That Ammannati felt great admiration for this statue is testified by a later letter addressed to the Accademia del Disegno in 1582. Though nothing is known of the patron who commissioned this miniature replica from the sculptor (only later, in 1570, did it come into the possession of the Duke of Urbino), its small format suggests that it was intended right from the start for a private collection. As Ilaria Ciseri and Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi have recently pointed out, however, the use of marble for a copy of a monumental sculpture and its conversion into a smaller format is unusual – such small-scale replicas were usually made in bronze.