The Metropolitan boasts a fine Raphael. It may not be the choicest Raphael, but it suffices to bring joy to we who prefer to spend time with the museum’s permanent holdings than to battle the crowds at the temporary shows. When we look at the Met’s recent acquisition, the Duccio “Madonna and Child” of circa 1300, we feel no contradiction in loving it right along with the Raphael. That’s a good thing about being alive in 2005.

It wasn’t always so.

The Met lavished virtually its entire acquisitions budget – some $45 million – to acquire the Duccio. Halston Raycie would have said they’d been hoodwinked.

Halston who?

He’s a fictional character in a 1924 novella, “False Dawn,” by Edith Wharton, from the “Old New York” tetralogy that the late Guy Davenport said contains the most adroitly limned historical imaginings ever set down by an American fiction writer. The story begins in the 1840s. Halston is a rich New Yorker who sends his son on the Grand Tour, so he may sow his wild oats before marriage and so he may, with his father’s money, purchase pictures – by “Lo Spagnoletto,” Carlo Dolce, Sassoferrato, and, father dearly hopes, Raphael – for the “Raycie Heirloom Gallery.”

Lewis befriends a dreamy young Englishman, found sketching clouds in a Swiss meadow. This is John Ruskin, just emerging as the aesthetic arbiter of Victorian Britain. His moralistic Medievalism drew him to the “Italian Primitives,” and inspired the British movement called the “Pre-Raphaelites.” He convinces Lewis to forego his father’s wishes and to purchase works by Giotto, Piero, and Mantegna. Duccio is unmentioned – but might well have been, for he was an “Italian Primitive” not yet fashionable – or much known – in New York. Raycie senior disowns his son for buying such shoddy pictures. Lewis and his wife – “Treeshy,” who reminds him of women in the pictures he bought – then open a “Gallery of Christian Art” in the unfashionable neighborhood of Third Avenue and 10th Street. Lewis dies a broken man. The ironic twist is that some time after his death his heirs realize what a fortune his paintings are worth.

Ruskin’s influence came to pervade late-Victorian New York. Calvert Vaux, the co-designer of Central Park and the Jefferson Market Courthouse, can be counted a “Ruskinian.” Vaux co-designed the house, “Olana,” in Hudson, N.Y., for the painter Frederic Church – one of Ruskin’s favorite artists. Church’s great “Heart of the Andes,” in the Met, might profitably be viewed in the same afternoon as the newly acquired Duccio. Indeed, we find in the Lehman Wing a wall that survives from Vaux’s original building for the museum, opened in 1880. Its “polychrome” stonework was a hallmark of the architecture inspired by Ruskin.

Attesting to Ruskin’s impact on taste, we may also adduce the Met’s purchase of the work by Duccio di Buoninsegna, a beautiful small picture of tempera and gold on wood, made so valuable in part by the extreme rarity of works positively attributed to the artist. It is a must-see.