On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Michelangelo's Moses
James Anderson British
Not on view
Anderson trained as a painter before turning to photography around 1845—much like Giacomo Caneva (whose work is on view nearby), a fellow patron of Rome’s Caffè Greco. Anderson is known for the exceptional quality of his reproductions of sculpture, made with albumen on glass negatives, which he sold through Joseph Spithöver’s bookshop in the Piazza di Spagna. The photographer exhibited this image at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where a critic acclaimed, “Sublime, then, is the prodigious Moses of Michelangelo: for this reproduction, the artist had to fight against the main element, light, which is so scarce in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli.” Anderson was one of the most successful professional photographers in nineteenth-century Rome; his son Domenico inherited the business in 1877 and continued operations well into the twentieth century.
