ANOTHER DIMENSION.(Dutch artist Michael Sweerts)

In Calvinist Amsterdam in the summer of 1661, the Catholic painter Michael Sweerts began to exhibit signs of indiscreet fervor. He fasted, took Communion in hidden chapels, slept on hard floors, and gave away his portraiture fees to the poor. Sweerts was from Brussels, the son of a merchant. He had worked as an artist in Rome, bought paintings and antiquities for a rich Dutch family, and run a drawing academy in Brussels in the late sixteen-fifties. And at some point, according to the travel diary of a French missionary, he underwent a "miraculous conversion." While he was in Amsterdam, where he had gone to help prepare a ship for an evangelical mission to China, his devotions were intense. Gazing at the cross, he was vouchsafed "beautiful secrets." He appeared to be not only "one of the greatest painters in the world," the French missionary wrote, but a paragon of piety.

The Counter-Reformation was committed to mobilizing the senses in the work of salvation, and because the natives of Asia were thought to be particularly moved by spectacle, the Societe des Missions Etrangeres, which followed the teachings of the austere St. Vincent de Paul, wanted to include an artist among the lay missionaries it was sending to the East. (There would also be a musician to introduce the heathen to the sweet euphony of the faith, a sculptor to fashion images of the Saviour, and a surgeon to minister to the bodies of converts.) Sweerts must have seemed right for the appointment. He spoke seven languages and had seen enough of the world to know its perils and stratagems, although not so much as to compromise his faith.

But it was a long way to China. On the arduous sea voyage in the winter of 1661-62, four members of the small company died. The interminable and dangerous overland journey through Syria and Persia made for an even sterner test of humility and discipline. Somewhere amid the dun tracks of the Persian plateau, Michael Sweerts became obnoxiously counter-suggestible. He was, the missionaries reported, incapable of holding his tongue. Not even Bishop Pallu, the leader of the mission, was spared his bumptious homilies. Though much tried, Pallu was patient. Sweerts had painted his portrait and the Bishop liked it. So his initial reprimand was mild, far too mild for some.

Sweerts would recant and abjectly implore forgiveness after his outbursts, but, as the caravan plodded on, the loudmouth got louder. One of the missionaries, Rene Brunel, went to the Bishop and let him know that the mere presence of the obstreperous Sweerts had become more than the rest of them could tolerate, and somewhere between Isfahan and Tabriz in the summer of 1662, there was a parting of the ways. Michael Sweerts journeyed on to golden Goa, the Portuguese colony on the west coast of India. It was another citadel of faith, but one--and this cannot have been a coincidence--dominated by the theological adversaries of St. Vincent de Paul's Lazarists: the Jesuits. Between Tabriz and Goa, between the ascetic Lazarists and the imperious Jesuits, the documentary trail, never very clear in the case of Sweerts, peters out completely. We have no idea how the artist got to India, or whether he preached or painted after he arrived. We know only that he died there in 1664. He was forty-six.

The first article on Michael Sweerts, disentangling him from the many other painters with whom he was confused, was published as long ago as 1907, but it is safe to say that he is still not exactly a household word, even among those few who, on entering a great museum, can't wait until they get to the Flemish Baroque. (Should you need a sit-down, it's a rule of thumb to look for galleries where rubicund boozers by Jacob Jordaens and eviscerated roebucks by Jan Fyt preside over imposing emptiness.) Sweerts has been a well-kept secret among Netherlandish art historians, dealers, and curators, surfacing in conferences or in seminar chatter as an unclassifiable, mercurial wonder who seemed to come from nowhere (with all due respect to Brussels) and to want to do everything.

The remarkable thing about this most protean of artists was that, technically, he could do almost everything. In the dazzling show of his work now at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford (a co-organizer of the exhibition, with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), you can find him serving up, with equal aplomb and confidence, a juicy Caravaggio street boy, all sharp blue silk and pouty come-hither lips; big-boned laborers with basketballer feet, chiselled into the same kind of dignified human monuments turned out by Velazquez (who was in Rome when Sweerts was, in the mid-sixteen-hundreds); a glossy little boy, the spitting image of Van Dyck's Stuart princes; and--in a moment of spectacular overreach--a plague scene meant to show Nicolas Poussin (whose "Plague at Ashdod" was famous in ...