In the film „Carving a reputation” (BBC, 1998) , it is said that when he saw the Medici Tombs (1524-31, in the Medici Chapel in Florence) during his travel scholarship when he was a student of sculpture at the Royal College of Art, – he didn’t want to look at Michelangelo’s work at first, but finally he admitted that those figures posess “a tremendous monumentality. (…) a grandeur of gesture and scale that for me is what great sculpture is” – wrote Moore in his diary . The nobility and grandeur of the Italian tradition was a humbling experience that threw Moore into a profound depression. To be a great sculptor, this is what he had to compete with.

He later claimed the reason he's "inspired" by "sumerian" art is that "he feels greco-roman art is over-represented.