A new painting has slipped ever so quietly into the Old Master galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No press releases trumpeted its coming and no camera crews, drawn to a record price tag, have broadcast its arrival to a gawking world. But this work, Corrado Giaquinto’s “Penitent Magdalene,” is a fine, honest-to-goodness Old Master painting. By that I mean that its very typicalness, the way it seeks to embody rather than transcend the tradition that engendered it, not only informs its specific beauties, but sheds light on the entire canon of Old Master art.

Giaquinto (1703–1766) was a Neapolitan artist who spent much of his career in the Italian cities of Turin and Rome, as well as in the Spanish court in Madrid. He and his large workshop spun out rich mythologies with almost incontinent ease. He is widely held to have been the finest 18th-century practitioner of fresco painting, after Giambattista Tiepolo.

The Met’s new acquisition, however, is a smallish altarpiece, 63-inches-by-46 1/2-inches, executed in oils on canvas. It was acquired at Sotheby’s in January for $1.3 million. John Ruskin, that ayatollah of Victorian aesthetes, would have hated it. Painted in Rome around 1750, it would have seemed worse (by his lights) than Baroque, worse even than Rococo: a Rococo variation on the Baroque, entirely lacking in that honesty, that truth to nature, that spiritual integrity that Ruskin imagined he desired.When “Old John Ruskin stuck his tusk in”(as one contemporary put it) he spoiled this sort of painting for nearly four generations of art critics. To them, the “Penitent Magdalene,”like so many works of the 17th and 18th centuries, would have seemed like the essence of rhetoric over poetry, of prelacy over true piety.

The 20th century was well under way before critics finally awakened to the secret of the Baroque and Rococo, that it was nearly always honest, always sincere.The question is: What was it being honest and sincere about? In the case of Giaquinto’s Magdalene, I submit to you that she is not penitent at all. The lazy, lolling way she raises her arm before a skull and a crucifix suggests that she is in no hurry to disown her voluptuary past.The angels who surround her are a little too dimpled and rubicund for the ministries of true religion, while the billowing, plum-colored sky is a shade too lovely to suggest the Day of Atonement.

Rather the true sincerity and integrity of this work seem to consist in an implicit happiness in being alive. Happiness informs every textured stroke of Giaquinto’s brush, every finely wrought curl on his angels’ heads. Is there any reason to doubt that, in this essentially optimistic view of the universe, there is as much true religion (although of a very different kind) as ever there was in a medieval tympanum, and more, probably, than you will find in the Pre-Raphaelites whom Ruskin so energetically championed.

Hoping to counter Ruskin’s influence, scholars like Sir Denis Mahon, writing in the 1930s, tried to show how this art was much more honest and rooted in reality than the Victorians had understood. But in so doing, Sir Denis largely acknowledged Ruskin’s priorities, without appreciating that, in fact, they were quite irrelevant to the assessment of such art. The truth is that Giaquinto’s “Penitent Magdalene” is, on one level at least, fully as artificial as Ruskin believed. There is hardly a detail in this painting that cannot be traced to earlier art. The smiling heads of the angels look back, beyond Carlo Maratta, through Pietro da Cortona, to their ultimate source in Correggio; the stiff planar fields of green and purplishblue drapery that cover the Magdalene’s legs are lifted bodily from the art of Ludovico Carracci; the smoky, sulphurous air recalls Francesco Solimena, the finest Neapolitan painter of the early 18th century.

Like most paintings in the Old Master tradition, then, Giaquinto’s work is a veritable echo chamber of earlier art. The associations shoot back as far as Giotto, sideways to Genoa, or even to points outside of Italy itself.The loveliness of this work consists less in its titular figure, who is only passingly well drawn, than in the splendidly depicted angels, the ripeness with which the paint is applied throughout, the way that details — such as the hair, the crucifix, and the book — collect themselves into relevance in those passages, that interest the artist most. Even the composition works well enough, despite several square feet of dead space in the lower third of the canvas.

Not the least endearment of Giaquinto’s “Penitent Magdalene”is that it has been purchased in honor of Keith Christiansen, for more than 20 years the Met’s distinguished Jane Wrightsman Curator in the department of European Paintings. Few people alive have a deeper or richer knowledge of the Old Master tradition so charmingly exemplified in this new acquisition at the Met.

jgardner@nysun.com