In its elegant bejeweled way, a new acquisition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art challenges one of the more persistent dogmas of art history. Ludovico Carracci’s “Madonna and Child with Saints,” a gift of Mark and Rachel Fisch, is clearly steeped in the late 16th-century mannerist traditions of central Italy. To anyone who has spent any time examining the art of this era, that fact should come as no surprise. And yet the textbooks would have us believe that Ludovico, together with his cousins Annibale and Agostino, was a democratizer of art, fumigating the Palace of Painting of all the vapid and effete refinements of the late cinquecento. In the 1930s, this point of view was promulgated with polemical force by Sir Denis Mahon, among others, in a worthy attempt to counter the critical contempt in which Baroque art was held by Ruskin and those whom he continued to influence. But it went too far.

Though some of the Carraccis’ early work in Bologna bears out that reading, most of what Ludovico produced over the course of his life (1555–1619) was far more ambiguous in its relation to the art that preceded it. In his own day, Ludovico was known — inconveniently for Mahon and his followers — as an eclectic, meaning that he was largely inspired by a promiscuous variety of previous artistic styles, rather than from a direct observation of nature.

The lovely and diminutive oil and copper “Madonna and Child with Saints” surely exhibits this approach to picture making. Oil on copper is a medium that painters of this period usually favored for small, lapidary “excercises de style” that deployed brilliantly enameled colors whose effect was anything but gritty or realistic.

In fact, the pervasive mood of this work falls completely within the camp of what has been called International Mannerism, the latest, laziest, and most languid flowering of mannerism, with none of the trailblazing fervor of its earliest Italian practitioners. By 1607, when the Met’s painting was created, this movement’s dolled-up forms and Day-Glo tones of plum and tangerine had pervaded the courts of Europe.

Behind that scrim of International Mannerism, however, a number of influences wrought upon Ludovico when he set about creating the “Madonna and Child with Saints.” The central figure is surely the Madonna and the most obvious source for her serpentine pose is the sibyls of the Sistine Chapel. But Michelangelo’s muscularity and the bizarre brilliance of his palette have been tamed through the influence of Raphael, which was ripened in the studio of Correggio and brought to overripeness in the work of Parmigianino. Madonna wears a head scarf that seems to look back to Raphael’s “Portrait of a Young Woman,” and behind her there is a hint of a rainbow that — at the risk of reading too much into the painting — suggests the faintest breath of Dosso Dossi, the oddest and most surreal artist of the early cinquecento. To her left stands a bevy of saints whose swooning expressions are the strongest indications of the artist’s debt to International Mannerism: Bernard in white robes, Paul with his sword, Peter with his keys, and Catherine with her crown.

To be sure, there are traces of that sturdier realism that Sir Denis wished to make the defining feature of Baroque painting in general and of the Carraccis’ Bolognese Academy in particular. This realism is especially evident in the finely conceived Christ child who, in contrast to the woozy buoyancy of the saints, seems grounded in this world and happily at peace with the laws of gravity. His almost casual pose recalls certain figures from Annibale Carracci’s celebrated ceiling in the Palazzo Farnese. Likewise, the splendidly rendered white robes worn by St. Bernard exhibit an unexpected weightiness and verisimilitude.

It must be said of this work, as of most paintings by Ludovico, that its overall conception and effect transcend the tactics of its details. Ludovico painted broadly rather than minutely and the finer points of this oil-on-panel, though fully adequate to their purpose, have a superficiality to them, a formulaic perfunctoriness that hardly represents the best part of the painting.

Rather, what demonstrates Ludovico’s claim to mastery is his daring use of negative space, of air and absence. That air that separates the Madonna from the saints is charged with visual consequence. Even bolder are the deep purple passages above the Madonna’s head; they are largely emptied of content, as is the still darker void at her feet. A good painter of average powers could have managed many square inches of the Met’s painting, but only a master could have conceived of and pulled off such a bold effect as those haunted voids.