NEW YORK—Julian Schnabel painted Placido Domingo last week in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the famous tenor's debut at the Metropolitan Opera, reports the New York Times. The roughly seven-foot-square portrait will be unveiled at a gala on September 28, four decades to the day after Domingo, then 27, stepped in for Franco Corelli to sing the role of Maurizio in Adriana Lecouvreur.

“Most tenors don’t last 14 years, let alone 40,” said Peter Gelb, the general manager of the opera. “We were just trying to think of an appropriate way to honor a career of such duration and excellence.”

"The Met has a long history of very large and not necessarily well-painted portraits of singers in costume. Some of them are quite good, but some are the painting equivalent of what you’d see in a wax museum,” said Gelb, who has reached out to established visual artists since taking the helm of the opera in 2006.

Before Domingo changed into costume to pose for Schnabel, at the artist's massive West Village studio, the two men paused for photographs with actor Mickey Rourke, who Schnabel had just photographed for the Village Voice. The Times described the pose, for which Rourke had drawn a tattoo on Schnabel's bare right pectoral reading "Got Milk," as "three towers of ego burning oxygen by the barrelful."