It was like old times. Veined with gray, the solid Cleveland sky imitated the 1916 façade of the original Cleveland Museum of Art almost perfectly, like a Home Depot paint match. The muscular backside of Rodin's famous bronze "The Thinker" (CMA's copy is also notorious for being blown up by student radicals in 1970) blocked my view of the Wade Park Lagoon as I stood at the top of the neoclassical building's sweeping marble steps. A little cigarette smoke curled past. For a minute it was 1969 or some earlier, innocent year.

Except that it wasn't. In some ways it was actually much better. Last Wednesday members of the media were invited to chat with CMA curators and tour the historic building, getting a first long look at the restorations, renovations and re-installations wrought by a small army of workers and scholars since the museum's closing three years ago.

Cleveland Institute of Art Chair of Visual Arts Saul Ostrow, on hand for the occasion, observed that some of his fourth-year students had never had a chance to set foot in Cleveland's great museum. It's been a long dry spell for everybody, especially those of us who are basically addicted to the place. Nothing between New York and Chicago compares to the CMA collection or the sheer historical musk it exudes. Like some kind of cultural DNA, it's a link to an ocean of human nuance that we badly need in our oversimplified times - and it's been missing.

The good news, delivered over muffins and coffee last Wednesday by CMA's new Director Timothy Rub and the curators responsible for the parts of the collection that opened on Sunday, June 29, is that restoration, more than redesign, has been the watchword for work completed so far. There wasn't any bad news, as it turned out. The whole experience had a dream-like quality. Reporters followed yellow arrows around several corners and up two improbably long escalators (our starting point was in the basement of the 1971 Marcel Breuer addition), through part of the still-closed new east wing, then down a glassed-in walkway along the eastern perimeter of the building, entering the original main floor through a new door into a once obscure gallery, formerly accessed through the rear of the Armor Court.

I was lost, but it didn't matter. Some walls had been removed, others added, ceilings were restored to their original soaring height. I counted 17 galleries in all, showing work from 10 different collections. In many places the oak floors had been redone, walls had been painted in a range of mostly warm tones running from the usual museum grays through brown to ivory. Among other delightful surprises was the amount of natural light gently washing into the rooms. The original conception of the Hubbell and Benes Beaux Arts structure included skylights in most galleries. These have been restored, and in some cases, reinvented.

One of the most strikingly altered galleries wasn't a gallery at all in the past. The old garden court with its wrought-iron balconies, tall brick walls, and vast, venerable fiddle-leaf fern, was once an outdoor area and then spent decades under a greenhouse-like roof. In its new incarnation it's one of the principal European painting galleries, the place to see larger works by the likes of Titian and Caravaggio. European painting curator Jon Seydl, himself something of a new addition, hired from the staff of the Getty Museum in 2003, explained that the design of the new, elegantly arched skylight ceiling of what is now called the Donna and James Reid Gallery, "was stolen from the Buckingham Palace picture gallery." I miss the fern and the travertine wishing well where kids used to toss dimes into the depths of the past - but not all that much. The revised garden court with its oak parquet floor and mind-bending selection of 17th and 18th century masterpieces seems like a particularly elegant room in a major European museum.

Another surprising, very gratifying transformation is found just to the north of the rotunda in a gallery that was used mainly as a "transitional space," as CMA's long-time director for design and architecture, Jeffrey Strean, remarked. For many years a beautiful skylight there was boxed in, perhaps in order to better provide dramatic artificial lighting for part of the medieval collection. Today it's unrecognizable - an open, airy place housing a suite of tall neoclassical paintings, banked around Antonio Canova's life-size marble statue of Napoleon's sister-in-law, posed as the muse Terpsichore.

We had been invited to "find our favorite piece," and I proceeded to do just that, trying not to scamper or make a fool of myself. First stop was Albert Pinkham Ryder's uncanny 1910 "The Race Track," a darkly brooding, meaty work which, for me at least, embodies much of what the activity of painting is all about. I could say that same thing about El Greco's magnificent "Crucifixion," and his "The Holy Family" nearby, hanging in the Reinberger Gallery of European Art (1600-1700). The newly organized collections all have been given taglines, like "Art for the Market," or "Naturalism and Idealism." This one, Gallery 3 on the Visitor's Guide map, is appropriately subtitled "Captured Emotions."

At the opposite end of that same long space I found my friend Isabella Brandt. I've known Peter Paul Rubens' first wife since I was a small child; she was my mother's favorite painting. And while I've visited CMA's portrait of her many times in reproduction over the past three years, nothing compares with the actual presence of the work. It's like a live conversation as compared to a digital recording; there's always something new about the surface, provoking a fresh response, something more or less pronounced about the gleam of laughter in her eyes, the mirth building at the corners of her mouth. Isabella is just on the verge of movement, about to toss her head back and say something cutting or kind, and superlatively alive. It's hard to explain, but the woman is there and will be for as long as the paint adheres to the canvas, as it has for 400 years. That's why a museum like this one is so important, not as a symbol of any economic or cultural hegemony, as the Weathermen thought who blew up "The Thinker," and even less as a mortuary for dead artifacts. It's a home to things so finely wrought that they cross the centuries to clasp our hands, and laugh at us. They need such a place to live.