This catalogue, which accompanies a collaborative exhibition between the Dresden State Museums and the J. Paul Getty Museum that brings together Bolognese Baroque paintings from both Dresden and Southern California public and private collections, provides an engaging survey of one of the most important and influential schools of Italian painting from 1575 to 1725. The exhibition will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from December 16, 2008, through May 3, 2009.
 The book’s essays make these paintings—the majority of them deeply religious and as a whole extremely innovative in their time—understandable to a modern audience. Charles Dempsey’s introduction gives an overview of the history of these painting, while Andreas Henning and Scott Schaefer lay out the history of the collecting of Bolognese paintings in Dresden and Southern California. Additional essays on the Carracci family of artists, portraiture, cabinet pictures, naturalism, classicism, and the concluding eighteenth-century developments under Giuseppe Maria Crespi further illuminate these incredible works. Â