Questions of artistic influence and authorship have been popular, often contentious, subjects in the field of art history ever since the discipline began. It is only natural that we want to ascribe names, places, and dates not just to artworks but to all things from our past – to place them in respect to what we already know and to connect as many dots as possible. This desire often drives art historians and curators, and it is the fuel behind the wonderful, albeit peculiar, show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “From Filippo Lippi to Piero dell Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master.”

The Met’s exhibition is unusual, fresh, and obsessive – even quirky. It is not a blockbuster event but a serious, scholarly roundup of disparate works – some great, some mediocre. It is, flaws and all, exactly the kind of show I wish more museums would attempt.

The full extent of the show’s depth and breadth probably will be appreciated only by Renaissance scholars. Its sprawling, melting-pot organization will disrupt viewers looking for a clear focus or a single chronological thesis. But the exhibition – which demands that visitors go back and forth between the works – should open up viewers’ eyes to the ways in which artists use the work of other artists.

Italian Quattrocento painting did not belong only to artists of the caliber of Masaccio, Piero, Paolo Ucello, and Fra Angelico, just as 20th-century painting did not belong only to Picasso, Mondrian, and Matisse. The art world, then as now, thrived as much because of peer pressure as it did because of patrons. Artists learn from other artists: Certainly they want their works to be purchased – but more importantly they want to be appreciated by other artists.

Don’t fret if you are not familiar with Fra Carnevale. (I had never heard of him before this exhibition.) Very little is known about the painter and architect from Urbino, Giovanni di Bartolomeo Corradini (c. 1420-84). A Dominican monk, he is a major minor artist, represented here by six paintings, including two reunited works from a possible altarpiece: the Met’s “The Birth of the Virgin” and the Museum of Fine Arts’s “The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple (?)” (1466), which are the central focus of, and the last works in, the exhibition.

The Met’s show proposes to solve a mystery concerning the authorship, subjects, and interconnectedness of the two paintings, which scholars have hotly contested for more than a century. It also attempts to canonize Fra Carnevale as a Renaissance master. The uncovering of recent documentation is part of the impetus behind the mounting of the exhibition, which, in densely packed catalog essays, convincingly makes the curators’ case regarding authorship; though I imagine that very little of this discussion will appeal to most viewers (I lost stamina and interest in the argument fairly quickly). Concerning the case of canonization, the show is less successful.

In all, the exhibition comprises around 50 paintings, drawings, and relief sculptures, as well as an illuminated manuscript and Maso di Bartolomeo’s “Reliquary for the Holy Girdle of the Virgin” (in copper, gold, horn, cloth, and ivory). The show concerns mid-Quottrocento Florence, but its focus is as much on second-tier and provincial artists -Benedetto Bonfigli, Giovanni di Piermatteo Boccati, and the Master of the Castello Nativity – as it is on its Renaissance stars: Domenico Veneziano, Luca della Robbia, Piero, Donatello, and Fra Filippo Lippi. In a sense, this exhibition – whose masters humbly play second fiddle to its less-talented headliner – champions underdogs.

It does not, to its credit, attempt to elevate Fra Carnevale to the level of Lippi, his teacher, or Piero, one of the artist’s greatest influences. What it does do is to illuminate the artistic milieu of that time and place – Florence was a hotbed of new, old, merging, and changing styles that included the firm, lingering hold of Gothic style (which flourished well into the 1450s); the expressionism of Veneziano; and the reawakening of humanism and classicism. This can be seen here in works as diverse as the monumental naturalism of Masaccio (experienced here in the works of Lippi) and the clarity, simplicity, and purity of Piero.

Lippi, with whom Fra Carnevale went to study in 1445, is well represented in this show, which begins with a beautiful reunited triptych of his “Madonna and Child Enthroned with Two Angels,” flanked by “Saints Augustine and Ambrose” and “Saints Gregory and Jerome” (c.1440). Lippi was a follower of Masaccio, not only of his full bodies and heavy shadows but of his use of narrative, perspective, and deep spaces. In the triptych the Virgin is huge and weighty, a giantess compared to the saints; the Infant is plump and sunken on her lap; and a serious, melancholic atmosphere enshrouds the figures and spaces.

In Lippi’s small, grave “Pieta”(c. 1437-9), the Virgin and St. John, standing in his oddly square, boat-like tomb, support the frail, dead Christ before a cave-like mountain of rock that looms behind the figures as it also appears to swallow or encase them. The show also includes Lippi’s tender works “Madonna and Child”(c. 1448-50) and “The Meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate” (c. 1443-5), as well as his gorgeous, two-panel work from the Frick, “The Annunciation” (c. 1438-9). A mellow range of violets, reds, pinks, and gold, the color of “The Annunciation” flares up to a hot orange-crimson in Gabriel’s cloak; the suddenness of which seems to force the Virgin back into space, where she is greeted by the Holy Ghost. It is as if, all at once, she were showing respect, awe, fear, and a (very natural) desire for privacy.

There are very few extant paintings by Fra Carnevale (indeed, there is disagreement about authorship regarding some of the works in this show), but it is clear that the artist, though he knew which masters to emulate – Lippi, Piero, Fra Angelico, Alberti – never came fully into his own. Fra Carnevale quoted extensively: Florentine archi tecture; the lessons of Leon Battista Alberti; the marble of Lippi; the columns and figures of Piero. Yet he stopped short of developing a singular voice.

“The Birth of the Virgin” and “The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple (?)” – the finale to which every other work in the show seems to point and to build are a bit of a disappointment. The two paintings – with their weird, elaborate architectural settings based on Alberti’s architectural designs and writings, antique models, and Piero – embrace courtly as much as sacred life. The small figures are subordinated to the buildings in ways reminiscent of Piero’s “Flagellation”; there is a finicky, delicate, almost childlike purity to the tiny figures, reminiscent of Fra Angelico, and there is a slender, refined idealism that recalls both artists.

But Fra Carnevale’s skies, obsessively articulated with clouds (which resemble whitecaps) and black birds (which feel maniacally churned out), do not open up into space – even though every element of perspective has been systematically, dutifully worked out. Fra Carnevale is an eccentric fabulist without personal vision. His paintings contain all the right elements, but they do not fuse with the kind of buoyant, mystical order, perfection, and calm experienced in, and essential to, Piero.

Fra Carnevale’s paintings feel like the accumulation of magnificent, at times wondrous, details. Yet the folds and cavities of his robes and the rivulets of his figures’ hair are repetitively, evenly fluted, like columns; or, like tendrils, they take on bizarre lives of their own. Figures feel placed, adhered to the paintings, and do not orchestrate space. Decisions in Fra Carnevale, though often beautiful, weird, or magical in and of themselves, fall apart when combined.

The strangeness of Fra Carnevale’s hand speaks not of invention but of mannerism. In the end, all the pieces are in place but an essential element of grace and wonder is missing.

Luckily, Piero’s sublime “Madonna and Child Attended by Angels” (c. 1470s of 1480s) is also on view. The painting – in which the Virgin’s head supports the architecture, and the Christ Child, solid as a marble column, levitates like an apparition in the space – is damaged and over cleaned. But it is as dynamic as it is calm; as ordered, dreamlike, and serene as it is monumental and suspenseful.

And as it happens, right upstairs, on the ground floor of the Lehman Wing, is a painting – not in the show – that revives and carries forth Piero’s mysticism, Classicism, and clarity: Balthus’s masterpiece “Nude in Front of Mantel” (1955). Rarely do we get the chance to see Piero and Balthus in such close proximity, and to experience this accidental juxtaposition of two related masters – the elements essential and alive to a Renaissance artist reborn anew in the hand of a Modern artist – is to witness the true making of a master.

Until May 1 (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).