In 1914, Sigmund Freud published a short essay about Michelangelo's statue of Moses. Freud had seen the sculpture, which shows the prophet holding tightly on to the tablets of the law, in the church of St Peter in Chains in Rome, and had been mesmerised by it. What was most arresting, he wrote, was that Michelangelo depicted Moses not in a transport of fury at the misdeeds of the Israelites but rather in the process of containing his anger. Michelangelo had recognised, in other words, that "Moses is flesh of sublimation" (sublimation, for Freud, being the means by which base instincts are renounced).
You can read the rest of my review of Mark Edmundson's wonderful book The Death of Sigmund Freud in today's Guardian.