As co-founder of Tiber Press, an art book publisher that brought together the talents of various poets and painters of the New York School between 1953 and 1977, Floriano Vecchi was a muse and an enabler of other people’s art. What few people realized at the time — and perhaps Vecchi least of all — was that he himself possessed artistic talents that equaled and may have surpassed those of many of the more famous painters and printmakers whom he assisted.

Though Vecchi (1920–2005) had studied printing and some architecture in the vicinity of his native Bologna, and though he had made some arresting copper images in the 1960s, he was nearing 70 before he showed any serious commitment to the sort of paintings that are now displayed at Columbia University’s Italian Academy. By that time, he and his partner, Richard Miller, as well as Mr. Miller’s former wife, Daisy Aldan, had established Tiber Press as one of the more exclusive purveyors of “artist’s books.” In different volumes, they paired the words and images of John Ashbery and Joan Mitchell, Kenneth Koch and Alfred Leslie, Frank O’Hara and Mike Goldberg, and James Schuyler and Grace Hartigan.

Surely it is nothing unusual for men and women in their golden years to discover the sedentary satisfactions of painting. But for the most part, the 11 works by Vecchi that are on view at the Italian Academy seem nothing like that: They are big, boldly ambitious, and quite clearly, albeit tastefully, homoerotic. Above all, there is nothing old about them. Not only do they exhibit the vigor and commitment of a far younger artist, but they also feel — notwithstanding that some are nearly 20 years old — fully and effortlessly contemporary.

Although Tiber Press published the prints of abstract or nearly abstract painters, Vecchi’s own paintings are almost polemically representational. This is so much the case that, in reproduction, they could almost be mistaken for photographs. Some of the smaller, and lesser, works on view are cityscapes depicting, from above, the rooftops of lower Manhattan. In others, Vecchi has painted still-lifes composed with all the opulence of such Neapolitan Baroque masters as Giuseppe Recco and Giovan Battista Ruoppolo.

But these works are largely undistinguished. They display little compositional flair, and the still lifes lack that oily exuberance for which the Baroque nature of his art would seem to call. One senses a residue of the aesthetics of photo-realism seeping into them and partially blighting them with its cool rejection of emotional commitment to anything depicted.

Far more compelling are Vecchi’s figurative works. These consist of generally life-size representations of a single model, a black man who reappears bizarrely in all of the figurative paintings: In one of them, a three-paneled image of the Last Supper, he is depicted, unaltered, as each of the apostles, as well as Christ himself. Though some of these figural paintings are religiously neutral, religion is a key ingredient in most of them, especially in another tripartite work in which the same model appears both as the crucified Christ and as the two thieves who were crucified with him. In all, the figures are rendered with a hieratic stillness that, in less able hands, could have tipped over into bathos and inadvertent humor.

Those who knew him claim that Vecchi — who fled the fascists and came to America in the early 1940s — retained his heavy Italian accent to the end of his days. It is possible to find an equally strong Italian element in his works, whether still-life or figural. He conceives them as someone who had grown up in the vicinity of the full-bodied classicism of the Renaissance and of Annibale Carracci’s Bolognese Academy. There is an implicit comfort in, and respect for, these ancient traditions, such as you see in the art of Giorgio de Chirico and, more recently, in Bruno Civitico and Claudio Bravo. At the same time, however, there is nothing of the cuteness, the pat and self-congratulatory virtuosity, that mark those later painters. Vecchi’s remarkably confident works pulsate with a seriousness that cannot be questioned, even if one is not quite certain what these works are meant to convey.

Their main weakness is the scraped flatness of the paint textures, as well as a somewhat desultory commitment to rendering and bringing to life the details of reality, a lack that is concealed beneath the superficially photographic quality of the works. In both respects, they recall the more famous works of Leon Golub. But these are better painted, stranger, and far more interesting.

Until April 8 (1161 Amsterdam Ave. at 117th Street, 212-854-2306).