There is nothing quite like those two little words, “decorative arts,” to send all but the most committed museumgoers heading for the exit. Unless the commodity in question is jewelry whose knockoffs can be sold in the museum store, any attempt to entice viewers with largely anonymous heirlooms from the ancien regime is probably a fool’s errand. To date, the Metropolitan Museum has had only one notable popular success in this regard, the gorgeous two-part tapestry show that occupied its galleries this past autumn.

Now, in what has to be a labor of love and curatorial masochism, the museum has mounted the oddly charming “Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure from the Palaces of Europe.” Tables, flagons, chalices, busts, clocks, and perfume burners, all fashioned from stone, make up the riotous polychrome feast of this latest show.

In titling a museum exhibition, it is always risky to include words whose meaning and even pronunciation will consternate half of the visitors. What are “pietre dure,” or, literally, “hard stones?” The Met itself doesn’t provide any easy answers. But to judge from the aggregate of objects on display, it would appear to mean, in its most general sense, decorative objects formed from hard stone such as porphyry or malachite, rather than from softer stone or from diminutive gemstones.

More pertinently, perhaps, pietre dure can refer to artifacts in two dimensions that behave like paintings, even though they are fashioned from cut stone. In this regard, pietre dure have been aptly described as stone marquetry, in other words, pieces of colored stone, rather than wood, cut to form both abstract and naturalistic forms. But perhaps the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio said it best when he described this art form as “pittura per l’eternità” — painting for eternity.

How to describe the charms of pietre dure? More than half a century ago, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard attempted to conceive in psychoanalytic terms the interaction of the human mind and body with elements like water, air, earth, and fire. I do not recall that Bachelard addressed the subject of stone, but, on the basis of the objects in the Met’s show, it is a worthy matter for speculation.

Assuming that viewers overcome their misgivings about decorative art, they will surely respond strongly to the objects on view in this show. First they will find themselves moved by that eternity to which Ghirlandaio referred. Whereas paintings and tapestries always impress us, even at subliminal levels, with a sense of their perilous fragility, what strikes us about examples of pietre dure is their near-indestructibility. Pristine, immaculate, and unaltered, they will outlast us all. And if the Met’s famed Farnese table, weighing several tons, ever fell on us — not an impossible propsition, given the Met’s disclosure on Tuesday that a 15th-century della Robbia sculpture had plunged to the floor after coming loose from its metal mounts — our departure would be so much the swifter.

Allied to this intuition about the hardness of the stone is a deep and reverent sense of the almost superhuman mastery over nature that has been displayed by the craftsmen or artists who fashioned these objects. To apply paint is as easy as breathing. To carve wood is surely harder, but feasible. But to take thousands of pieces, large and small, of malachite or marble or onyx or porphyry, burnish them to a unnatural smoothness, and reconfigure them to form images as complex as an old master painting, would seem to transcend human artifice.

And the result is apt to be a weird and memorable beauty. To see the Florentine “View of the Pantheon” (1797) next to the painting by Ferdinando Partini upon which it was based is like hearing one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, the “Hammerklavier,” for example, played on a harpsichord. There is a nearly one-to-one correspondence between these two cityscapes, assuming you could superimpose one atop the other. But the seamless interpenetration of the painting’s hues and halftones, like the sounds of a piano, have been translated into a brittle and bracing visual staccato in this masterful example of pietre dure. There is, as well, an almost garish intimation of three-dimensionality to the stone cityscape, to the way the light catches within the petrified wood that forms the columns of the Pantheon, or within the hard stone from which the gifted artisan has fashioned the steps leading up to Giacomo della Porta’s fountain.

Ultimately, however, the charm of pietre dure consists in the conflict and collusion between that almost superhuman control and the essential fortuity of the materials in question. From his variegated tray of stone samplings, the artisan of the Pantheon image sought whatever came closest to the painted original and to the natural order, the weather and the light, that inspired the painting in the first place. But the ineluctable mineral essence of stone did not allow for the sustained monotones that the paint so effortlessly achieved. After 100 million years, the earth had yielded up the dizzying complexity of its metamorphic and sedimentary rocks, and the master of the Pantheon view learned, like so many other masters whose works in pietre dure are now on view at the Met, to exploit that fortuity in the name of his art.