The National Gallery's collection of later Italian paintings was formed largely by Samuel H. Kress (1863-1955), one of the greatest collectors of Italian pictures in America. Kress' enthusiasm for Italian art was exceptional in that it encompassed painters from Cimabue to Tiepolo. Kress collected Italian baroque paintings such as Tanzio da Varallo's Saint Sebastian, purchased in 1935, at a time when most American collectors of Italian art were interested only in the Renaissance.

Beginning in the 1920s, Kress and his foundation assembled, first in New York, and later in Washington, the nation's most inclusive collection of Italian art. In 1938 he decided to donate the collection to the National Gallery of Art, and when it opened in 1941, 375 paintings and 18 works of sculpture from the Kress gift were installed in the West Building. The Gallery's holdings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian paintings have been enriched by gifts from P.A.B. Widener and Paul Mellon, and more recently from purchases. This catalogue is the first of four volumes to document the National Gallery's great collection of Italian paintings.

Included are some of the most important baroque paintings in America, by Lodovico and Annibale Carracci, Domenico Fetti, Orazio Gentileschi, Guercino, Jusepe de Ribera, and Bernardo Strozzi. The collection is also rich in Italian paintings of the eighteenth century, notably by the Venetians Bellotto, Canaletto, Guardi, Sebastiano Ricci, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, but also by Panini, Crespi, and Magnasco.