Though it is admittedly regressive to feel competitive about such things, I have just seen, in the space of one week, the Metropolitan Museum’s newly acquired “Mass of St. Basil,” by Pierre Subleyras, and the Louvre’s version of the same painting, and the Met’s is superior.

Both are preparatory studies for a full-dress altarpiece that was executed for St. Peter’s in Rome and now resides in that city’s Santa Maria degli Angeli. Though Subleyras (1699–1749) was a contemporary of Boucher and Chardin, he represents a more conservative strain of 18th century European Painting, one in which the traditions of the Baroque, with all their earnest oratory and Counter-Reformation vigor, survived almost unaltered from the days of the Caracci, nearly 150 years earlier.

The theme of the painting is the triumph of the saint, and, by extension of the church itself, over the Roman emperor, Valens, and, by extension, over the temporal powers of the earth. Understandably, this theme was a source of inextinguishable delight to popes throughout the ages, and it is easy to see why the piece was commissioned for St. Peter’s in the first place. At the same time, the reason for Basil’s tiff with Valens was the latter’s preference for the heresy of Aryanism, which the Catholic church had to vanquish in order to assert its eventual pre-eminence. In the present work, Valens has come to arrest Basil, but is so overwhelmed by the latter’s self-evident holiness that he promptly falls into a swoon, as we see in the lower right-hand corner.

In both paintings, the saint, who died in his 40s in 379 C.E., is presented to us as an unaccountably old man. The splendor of his white robes is matched only by the snowy brilliance of his long white beard. Set above the rest in a carapace of elaborately classical architecture, he appears before a pair of Corinthian columns in a composition that looks back beyond Rubens and the early Caracci to Titian’s “Pesaro Madonna” of 1526. Beneath him on the left is the sundry clamor of devout goings-on, while on the right the emperor Valens falls in a swoon. Meanwhile, a pair of airborne putti plug the hole in the composition at the top right quadrant.

Though the two versions — the Met’s preliminary one and the Louvre’s highly finished version — are nearly identical in specific details, their effect is very different, and the Met’s is better in every way. There is, for example, a general crudity, a dreary laboriousness to the accumulated detailing of the Louvre’s version, especially when compared with the crisp, yet unpedantic freshness of the corresponding passages in the Met painting. This is especially true of the face of the saint at the Met, deep-browed, hook-nosed, and silver-haired, which is both the focal point of the entire composition and its most finely painted part. Meanwhile the angels at the Met really look airborne of their own volition, while at the Louvre, their counterparts appear to be stranded on a string.

Most important, there is a perfect balance between the general and the particular in the Met painting. Its details are sharp, but not to the point of wresting themselves out of their larger context like those of the Louvre, which appear as a myriad of tiny distractions. At the same time, there is a nice subordination of the various components of the Met’s composition, especially the figure of Valens in the foreground, and the angels and architecture of the background, to the figure of Basil in the middle ground.

In the Louvre painting, by contrast, the overdetermined quality of the detailing imparts to each level the same weight and force: The result is a displeasing incongruity in which the foreground serves almost as a barrier to the eye’s progress through the various planes of the picture. That being the case, the young man who looks out at the viewer in the Louvre’s version, but not in the Met’s, appears precisely where he is needed least and serves as the greatest distraction of all.

Subleyras is hardly a household name. Rather, he is the sort of artist best known to art historians and especially to collectors and their dealers. He was effective both as a painter in the grand manner as well as a subtle and nuanced artist who, in one half of his oeuvre, depicted the contemporary life around him. But in terms of a high degree of elegance and finish, he rarely surpassed his achievement in this newest acquisition by the Met.