Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Download or read book Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries written by National Gallery of Art (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.