Though little known outside of those circles where the Old Masters are loved for being old and for being masterly, Domenico Fetti is an artist of power. The recent acquisition of his Salvator Mundi is an enhancement of the Met’s collection of Baroque paintings.

Enthroned on dark, billowing clouds, and hemmed by a flashing radiance, this Savior of the World appears amid a storm of angels and holds in his hands a globe of the earth. Far below, a sliver of landscape seems dreary and uninviting compared with the heavenly riot amid which he sits. Despite the darkness of the clouds, there is a shrill joy to this work of art, communicated through the molten gold of the light as it contrasts with the icy clarity of his lapis lazuli robes and a hint of burgundy in the sleeves. All of the painter’s artifice, however, is designed to rivet your attention on Christ’s face, which is the most finely painted part of the canvas.

Fetti’s dates are variously given, but traditionally his birth is set in 1589 and his death in 1623. Most of this brief but industrious life was spent in Rome, Mantua, and Venice, in more or less that order. Fetti, therefore, came of age at that pivotal instant in Italian painting when the art of Mannerism and the Counter-Reformation was transfiguring itself in the new synthesis of the Baroque.

Like every Old Master painting, Fetti’s Salvator Mundi, probably painted toward the end of his life, represents a complicated negotiation with the art that preceded it. In general, there are three ways in which eminent artists confronted the tradition from which they emerged. Like Veronese, they could base their career largely upon the felicitous enhancement of a single source (in his case, Titian). Or, like Rembrandt, whatever his early debt to Italy, they are essentially self-invented. Or, like Fetti, they resemble a snowball that consumes everything in its path until, from the chaotic debris, a new idiom is born.

In the Salvator Mundi (a gift of Dianne Modestini, and one of two Fettis in the Met), the main template is surely Correggio, the great Parmesan master of nearly a century before, and the man who holds the patent on all those cherubim that populated the churches and salons of Europe down to the French Revolution. But in Fetti’s art, unlike in Correggio’s, you usually find some conspicuous grounding in the real world. In this respect, he was inspired by those genre scene painters who sold their wares on the streets of Rome, as well as by a northern matter-of-factness that crops up incongruously in the art of Rubens, who preceded Fetti as the court painter to the Gonzagas in Mantua. As the art historian John Spike has pointed out, this influence is especially evident in the unadorned and demotic clarity of Christ’s face.

There is another quality to Fetti’s art, and it is difficult to determine the degree to which he pioneered or borrowed it. You find a delicious toccoin his paintings, a touch, a tactility that is nearly unique to him. Within the context of a general fidelity to retinal reality, Fetti imparts a controlled but luxuriant gooeyness to his surfaces that is one of the most pleasant aspects of his paintings. You see this in the robes, but especially in the face and hands of the Salvator Mundi.

Here, as elsewhere, Fetti’s realism coexists with a certain dreaminess that, at any moment, can become the dominant element in his paintings. It is never expressed as anything aggressively bizarre, let alone surreal. Rather, it is a mediation between the hard facts of the world and the inner life of the spirit. It invokes a mood more dominant in the early 17th century than at any other moment in Western culture before Symbolism and Postmodernism in certain of its strains. I refer to that enchanted, bittersweet inclination to reverie that you find in the plays of Calderón de la Barca and the later Shakespeare. Poised between the here and now and the great beyond, the Met’s new painting is “as it were an after dinner’s sleep, / Dreaming on both.”