When the great art collections of the Gilded Age were being amassed — the very ones that went on to form the core of the Metropolitan Museum of Art — everyone wanted to invest in Renaissance Italy and 17th-century Holland, but few collectors showed any interest in the Italian Baroque. For that reason, to this day, the Met’s holdings of the Bolognese, Roman, and Neapolitan schools are somewhat spottier than other areas of Old Masters painting. In recent years, however, some respectable additions to the collection have remedied that deficit. And now, with the installation of a newly acquired “Lamentation” by the great Bolognese master Domenichino (1581-1641), the Met’s collection is richer than before.

The installation of this work represents the second time in less than a year that the Met has acquired a painting that closely resembles one in the Louvre — and in both cases a strong argument can be made that the New York painting is superior. Last summer the Met hung Pierre Subleyras’s “Mass of Saint Basil,” and the new “Lamentation,” an early work by Domenichino, is based on a far larger painting in the Louvre by Annibale Carracci.

For a long time, Domenichino’s version was attributed to Annibale himself, an understandable confusion given that both men where pillars of the Bolognese school, and Domenichino was Annibale’s most distinguished student.

At his best and most typical, Annibale exhibits a muscular, reinvigorated mannerism that spills out of the canvas and into the physical space it adorns. Unapologetically oratorical, his style consciously cultivates the grand manner. But like many a gifted orator, he occasional tips over in bathos, and that is what happens in his “Lamentation” (or “Pieta,” as the Louvre calls it), painted around 1602 for Cardinal Odoardo Farnese and subsequently placed over an altar in the Church of San Francesco a Ripa in Rome. Clearly the real focus of Annibale’s interest in this painting is the depiction of the dead Christ and the two angels who weep at his side. But that accounts for scarcely a third of this big oil-on-canvas. As for the rest of it, the figures of the Mary, the Magdalene, and St. Francis are the pictorial equivalent of boilerplate. Chromatically the painting is depleted, and compositionally it is something of a bore. This windy posturing is the sort of thing which, for most of the 19th century, gave Baroque art a bad name.

The effect of Domenichino’s painting, the second by the artist in the Met’s collection, is very different. It is much smaller than Annibale’s and thus much more intimate. Because it is oil on copper, rather than on canvas, there is a lustrous sheen to the colors, a haze of bejeweled artifice, that is quite different from the life-size and more “realist” effect of Annibale’s painting. The oratorical quality is preserved, but because it exists on a smaller scale, it feels more palatable. Domenichino preserves Annibale’s composition, but he has broadened it and excised some of the wasted space that Annibale preserved on the top of his canvas, causing the work to seem somewhat more stable and grounded. Most important, Domenichino has replaced the figure of St. Francis with that of Joseph of Arimathea. Because the latter is standing more than crouching, and because he is provided with the ballast of a pillar to lean on and a jug to hold, the later composition takes on an interesting complexity as it curves upward on the left to avoid the depressing downward movement of Annibale’s painting.

Like Annibale, Domenichino has his moments of inattention, of relaxation, in the brightly colored draperies most of all. His faces are slightly better-done, especially Mary’s face, though there is a touch of pedantry to his depiction of Christ’s lifeless torso, which was more ably realized in the earlier work.

The curly-haired putto who looks out at us is clearly based on Annibale’s original. At the same time, however, his gaze presages one of the most typical and most prepossessing moments in Domenichino’s career, his depiction of “The Hunt of Diana,” painted in 1620 and now in the Galleria Borghese. In both paintings, a figure peers at the viewer with almost unnerving directness. Domenichino obviously did not invent this gaze, but he made it his own.

Clearly, the new Met acquisition is an apprentice work. Domenichino was probably in his early 20s when he completed it. And while it displays some continuity with what he would later become, there are clear differences. Most important, it exhibits none of the classicizing equipoise for which Domenichino would become known. He was a fine painter, a classic, but he is not easy to embrace warmly. Among his fellow Bolognese painters, he has neither the ethereal sweetness of Guido Reni nor the fulgurant drama of Guercino. Often basing his paintings on antique friezes, he is, both compositionally and chromatically, a cool master, yet his classicism never aspires to the sustained, almost polemical tenor of Poussin.

The satisfactions of his art, rather, are more muted. He can be a superb painter, especially in his frescoes, and he has a finely calibrated instinct for balance and form. Some of that is already evident in the early work that the Met has just put on display.