It is over 20 years since Serge Guilbault wrote his irritating book “How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art.” His point was that, after World War II, the CIA colluded with the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, to mount a traveling exhibition of Abstract Expressionism, called “Art of This Century.” That show, the author contends, was instrumental in wresting the crown of modern art from Paris, where it had been for 150 years, and transferring it to New York, where it has remained ever since.

Whatever importance one grants this author’s paranoid musings (and he has many supporters in the academy), it is worth mentioning that Paris itself had stolen, as it were, the crown of art from Rome sometime around the turn of the 19th century. From the High Renaissance through to the outbreak of the French Revolution, Rome was the nursery of painters and sculptors. Not for nothing was it the summa of French artistic ambition, through the 18th century and beyond, to win the Prix de Rome. And not for nothing did the finest French painters, from Poussin to Ingres, spend much if not most of their careers in the Eternal City. Yet in the fullness of time, Paris became a code word for Modernism and the experimentation and radicalism it implied; by the same token, Rome became a byword for artistic conservatism, for a rearguard antagonism to the modern movement.

And so it should come as no surprise that the National Academy, which has long prided itself on mounting a quixotic, traditionalist offensive against Modernism, should come out on the side of Rome. This is the most eloquent message to be gleaned from “Italia! Muse to American Artists, 1830–2005,” a charmingly uneven exhibition that has just gone up in the Academy Museum, which is connected with the school.

This show comprises some 51 works by academicians, living and dead, including those, like Daniel Huntington, who first journeyed to the bel paese in the 1820s, and those, like Gregory Amenoff, who have visited in recent years.

It is appropriate that the Museum should decide to mount this show in summer. Italy, above all others, is the land of summer fun. Unlike most other industrialized nations, it has long been a destination for leisure and for a kind of abstracted expansion of one’s experiential horizons, as opposed to say, France, Germany and England, which promise a more sober kind of edification. Venice, Siena, Pisa, Naples — they all seem to answer to Keats’s call for “a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene!” As such, Italy remains something of a figure of fun among the nations, a land that does not take itself too seriously and so is not taken too seriously by others.

As for the academicians included in this show, the ones who acquit themselves with greatest success are those, mostly from the 19th century, who seem comfortable in their artistic conservatism. I refer to works like William Stanley Haseltine’s “Sunrise at Capri” (1890) that capture well that dewy Turner-esque dream of Italy, the Italy of Childe Harold and Berlioz, which is of course a myth, and yet, also somehow true.

This conservatism is evident as well in Jules Emile Saintin’s “View Near Rome” (1864), which transfers some of the positivist lessons of Frederic Edwin Church from the banks of the Hudson to those of the Tiber. Yet another example of conservatism will be found in Carlo Ciampaglia’s delightful “Village Scene” (1924), its green and tawny enamel tones and precise lines affecting an air of Quattrocento sobriety.

It is among the more recent Academicians that I find a tremor of bad faith. When they try to make their peace with the modern world and modern art — when, that is, they allow a bit of Paris into the Roman Campagna — the results often seem halfhearted and half-baked.

There is nothing wrong with the Venetian etchings of Ernest Roth and John Taylor Arms, but they are a little too derivative of Whistler’s masterful tribute to the serene republic. More recently, Alfred Bendiner’s Klee-like view of Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice and John Ross’s schematic view of the Duomo in Florence are pleasant enough as illustrations, but bring little new depth or insight to their oft-depicted subjects.

Yet something of interest may be happening in several of the newest works in the show. In Clare Romano’s “Zig Zag Bursts” and “Yellow Bursts with Palladio’s Church,” both from the past two years, the painter applies an impassioned spray of pigment to capture the pyrotechnics of Italy and Italian life. In the process, she comes closer than most to capturing the soul, or what we foreigners take to be the soul, of that great nation.

A century and a half after the rise of Modernism and the shift of the art world’s focus from Italy to France, neither stands any longer as an essential part of the artistic upbringing.But both nations continue to instruct and inspire through the multitude of their masterpieces, so the very idea of Rome in particular as the great taproot of Western Art continues to fascinate the members of the National Academy. Even when they embrace Modernism, as do some of the later entries to this show, their pilgrimage to Italy signals and fortifies their embrace of the spirit, if not the letter, of the academic tradition.

Until December 31 (1083 Fifth Avenue, between 89th and 90th Streets, 212-369-4880).