It reads like the setup to a New Yorker cartoon: eight of the opera world’s leading sopranos squeezed into one not especially large room. Where, exactly, will they find room to fit their egos?

Such is the concentration of drama and coloratura in “The Sopranos,” an exhibition of portraits of eight opera singers, including such celebrated figures as Deborah Voigt, Renée Fleming, and Angela Gheorghiu, all of whom are scheduled to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in the upcoming 2008-09 season, painted by the artist Francesco Clemente. The show, now on view at the Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met at Lincoln Center, runs until September 26.

“The idea was that there really hadn’t been, for as long as I could remember, opera singers of this caliber who had their portraits painted by one of the leading artists of the day,” the director of the Gallery Met, Dodie Kazanjian, said.

Following a tip from the husband-and-wife artists John Currin and Rachel Feinstein, with whom she had met previously while working on the Gallery Met’s inaugural exhibition in 2006, Ms. Kazanjian visited Mr. Clemente in his New York City studio, where the artist was then painting a series of portraits of artists and intellectuals. Impressed, she asked Mr. Clemente to paint the singers. “He has a way of getting to a person’s interior. He doesn’t paint from photographs and there’s something that happens when a person sits in front of him,” Ms. Kazanjian said. She added: “There’s a kind of transformation in Clemente’s work that I think all opera has.”

The logistics of the project were considerable. Executed during a period of four months earlier this year, the large oil-on-linen portraits were painted in single, intense sittings, often as short as three hours. Mr. Clemente depicted the singers in character, which meant that stage makeup, costumes, and wigs had to be applied.

The resulting series is classic Clemente: large, floating faces and saucer eyes, with a dreamy, poetic, and overripe air. Curiously, none of the sopranos are painted in the act of singing, although several of the portraits, especially that of Ms. Voigt, who is known for her performances of Strauss and Wagner, are thunderously operatic. Ms. Voigt will be appearing at the Met in the title role of Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” in September.

Similarly, Mr. Clemente’s portrait of the Finnish singer Karita Mattila in the title role of Strauss’s “Salome” has a mad-in-the-eye intensity. This sense of the theatrical is present in nearly all of the larger-than-scale portraits.

The exception to the group is a much-smaller watercolor portrait of the Russian Anna Netrebko. Because Ms. Netrebko, who will sing the title role in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” at the Met in January, was pregnant at the time, Mr. Clemente painted the soprano out of character, in a quiet, languorous mood.

“When you see them all in the room together, it’s almost like a temple of goddesses,” Ms. Kazanjian said.