Each one expresses on each masterpiece a different opinion, none says what would solve the enigma for a simple admirer. However, in my opinion, what grabs us so violently can only be the intention of the artist, as much as he has managed to express it in his work and to make us seize it. I know that there can be no question here, simply, of understanding comprehension, it is necessary that it is reproduced in us the state of passion, of psychic emotion which provoked in the artist the creative impulse. But why can not the artist's intention be specified and translated into words like any other manifestation of psychic life?
Perhaps this can not be true for masterpieces without the application of analysis. The work itself must be susceptible to analysis if this work is the expression, effective on us, intentions and emotions of the artist. But to guess this intention, I must first discover the meaning and content of what is represented in the work, therefore I interpret it.
[...] The marble statue of Moses, (...) in the church of Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens, in Rome, is also one of those enigmatic and grandiose works of art. (...) because no sculpture has ever made me feel more powerful.
It is really Moses that she represents, the legislator of the Jews, holding the Tables of the Law.
"No work of art in the world has inspired more contradictory judgments than this Pan-headed Moses, and the simple interpretation of the statue is already fraught with absolute contradictions."

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I think, however, that we can not better characterize the expression of Moses' face than Thode did.
(...) In his interpretation of the expression of the face; he finds no emotion there, "nothing but a proud complicity, a nobility full of soul, the energy of the Faith.
Did Michelangelo want to create in Moses a "character and state of mind of all times", or did he represent his hero at a certain moment, but then highly significant in his life?
Most critics have opined in this last sense and even know the scene of the life of Moses that the artist has immortalized. It would be his descent from Mount Sinai: coming to receive from God himself the Tablets of the Law, he realizes however that the Jews made a golden calf, and dance around with cries of joy.