Superlatively celebrated as a “stupendous metaphysical-visual exhalation” by New York, the Met’s exhibition of Micheangelo drawings (“Divine Draftsman and Designer”) closes today after a three-month run in town. In the exhibit’s last room, one finds a tall painting of Michelangelo-as-Moses by Federico Zuccaro (d. 1609) that suggests a view of the exhibition’s subject not simply as a draftsman of the divine but as a draftsman holy himself:
During my last visit, I noticed a Latin epigram underneath Zuccaro’s painting, which reminds me a little of Raphael’s in the Pantheon. Pictured up top, it reads as follows:
Dvm pingis vitam Michaeli Zvccare reddis
Teque una eternvm ne moriare facis
Or in (not especially felicitous) English:
While you paint, Zuccaro, you restore the life of Michael[angelo]
and along with him, you fashion yourself imperishable to avoid dying
A bit hopeful (at least for Zuccaro), but also notably heavy in its slow, spondaic mourning. In fact, aside from the fifth foot of the hexameter and the second half of the pentameter—which require dactyls—the couplet uses spondees throughout.
As gloomy as we might take it, the epigram seems to have kept its promise of long-lasting fame for Zuccaro: there he was in the finale of a “metaphysical-visual exhalation,” enjoying some small portion of that draftsman’s divinity, if perhaps by association.