“The Glorification of the Royal Hungarian Saints,” by Franz Anton Maulbertsch, has just gone on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it is an inspired acquisition. An oil sketch, it hangs in the same room as the Met’s extensive collection of oil sketches by Giambattista Tiepolo, a far better known contemporary of Maulbertsch.

To say that most people, even students of the Old Masters, know little about Maulbertsch is putting the matter politely. He may be big in Bavaria, Vienna, or the Bodensee, but that is the extent of his general renown.

And yet, discerning scholars and connoisseurs have long harbored a weakness for this artist, who lived between 1724 and 1796. For them, Maulbertsch almost amounts to a guilty pleasure.

In most cases, to be a German or, worse, an Austrian old master is a ticket to oblivion. And to be a largely Baroque artist in the years leading up to the French Revolution is to be inexcusably retrograde and backward-looking.

Yet the seductive power of Maulbertsch, as evident in the Met’s new acquisition, consists in a fizzy, bubbling charm, a Mozartean verve, a painterly sweetness as irresistible as the dollop of schlag on a Sachertorte. Before the acquisition of this painting, neither Maulbertsch nor Paul Troger, his foremost teacher, nor any other master of the South German and Austrian Baroque and Rococo, was represented in the paintings collection of the Met. But as the Met’s new acquisition shows, it, and the movement to which it belonged, represent no merely servile imitation of more mainstream art: They are highly individualistic re-interpretations of that mainstream.

“The Glorification of the Royal Hungarian Saints” is a grisaille painted in 1772 as a preliminary study for the ceiling of the Cathedral of Gyor (or Raab) in Hungary. Its main purpose, therefore, was to hammer out the composition of the completed work. As such, its details and colors are largely embryonic, as all secondary concerns are subordinated to the initial and overall thrust that will dominate the project. The most emphatic feature of the work is the diagonal thrust from the lower left-hand side of the canvas to the top right. Floating on racks of cloud are, from low to high, Saint Ladislas, Saint Steven, Saint Emeric and, finally, Saint Martin of Tours. Especially the first of these saints is engulfed in darkness that is mitigated with light as the eye ascends the painting so that, by the time it reaches the airborne trinity at the top of the composition, everything has been transformed into blinding light.

Among the inspirations for this and other works by Maulbertsch, one usually cites Paul Troger and his Venetian contemporary Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, largely because of the tumultuous chiaroscuro that Maulbertsch usually favored. But it would be more accurate perhaps to say that he is channeling Piazzetta through Troger. The artist has little use for the weight and sinew with which Piazzetta endows his late Baroque figures. Rather he succeeds, somewhat improbably, in transforming the often tragic implications of chiaroscuro into something of Rococo charm.

He differs as well from his new neighbor Tiepolo in the sources of his art. Tiepolo emerges out of the Baroque but looks back, almost with patriotic zeal, to his great compatriot Paolo Veronese, two centuries earlier.

Maulbertsch, by contrast, derives his conception of the human figure and the charged cosmos that encircles it from the restlessly swirling, balletic litheness of International Mannerism and the School of Prague. Though these too were 16th-century phenomena, they exerted the most powerful influence on the Rococo movement in Germany and Austria, but not in Italy or France. That influence is evident in the abstracted doll-like figures that often fill Maulbertsch’s works, even those that are entirely finished and not merely studies.

Maulbertsch is not a profound painter, and the purity of his commitment to his art can occasionally be questioned with justice. But he was undeniably a good painter and a delightful one. Institutions as big as the Met are unlikely to mount an exhibition of German and Austrian Baroque and Rococo painting. But that would be a show well worth seeing. For the time being, this new acquisition by Maulbertsch plugs what was an unfortunate hole in the collection of the Met, and of American museums in general.