This volume is the ninth published in the series of systematic catalogues of the National Gallery of Art collections and the first devoted exclusively to the Gallery’s great collection of Italian paintings. Although in America in the first half of the 20th century Italian baroque art was generally not held in the same regard as Renaissance art, the Gallery has from its inception been one of the country’s major repositories of later Italian painting. The presence of so many fine examples in Washington is due greatly to the generosity of Samuel H. Kress, who sought to create at the Gallery “as complete a representation as possible of the Italian School of painting and sculpture.” The collection includes a number of important works by Annibale and Lodovico Carracci, Orazio Gentileschi, Jusepe de Ribera, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Canaletto.