Michelangelo's Horned Moses Mistake

Michelangelo's famous 1513 sculpture of Moses, housed in Rome's San Pietro in Vincoli, shows the prophet with two horns on his head. This bizarre detail came from a mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate Bible, which rendered the Hebrew word "keren" as "horns" instead of "rays of light." In Hebrew, keren can mean both "radiated" and "grew horns," leaving room for error. As a result, many Renaissance artists, even Michelangelo, portrayed Moses as horned, forever immortalizing a translation slip in marble.

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