The funeral epigrams which Michelangelo wrote for the death of the young nephew of his friend Luigi del Riccio have been dismissed much as Johnson dismissed the metaphysical poets. Commentators have followed J. A. Symonds, who speaks of their ‘laboured philosophical conceits… strange blending of artificial conceits with spontaneous feeling’, and judges that they exhibit ‘too much of scholastic trifling and too little of the accent of strong feeling’.

The cavilling manner of the epigrams themselves, not to say Michelangelo's self-deprecating asides to del Riccio, may seem to bear out Symonds's assumption that the sequence was not seriously meant:

Yet Michelangelo's habitual disparagement of his poetic skill tends to mask a profoundly serious concern. The sequence rings the changes round some seemingly extravagant conceits which the poet offers tentatively enough by way of lamenting the loss of so brilliant a youth, whose beauty is shadowed in the funeral effigy which Michelangelo himself had carved for the boy's tomb.