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(2003). American Imago, 60:21-40

Sacred Objects/Illusory Idols: The Fake in Freud's “The Moses of Michelangelo”

Aviva Briefel

Before earning the status of a great original, Michelangelo began his career as a forger. Vasari (1568) recounts that the young artist made copies of Old Master drawings, smoking and staining them to give them an authentic appearance. He later fashioned a statue of a sleeping Cupid, which Lorenzo di Medici allegedly encouraged him to pass off as an ancient artifact. Vasari argues that the believability of his forgery was a major catalyst in establishing Michelangelo's reputation (421-23). Subsequent biographies of Michelangelo include fascinated descriptions of the artist as forger, attributing other fakes to the master's corpus. According to one of these accounts, after making a bust of the goddess Ceres, breaking off its arm, and burying it, Michelangelo informed a group of archeologists that he had discovered an ancient statue, which, upon examination, they attributed to the Greek sculptor Praxiteles. As they were admiring their find, Michelangelo produced the broken arm, showed t

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