The Dresden Gallery, already famous in the eighteenth century, quickly became one of the favorite places for the Grand Tour traveler to visit after it opened as a public museum in 1855. Miraculously preserved from the bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, its fabulous holdings are to a large extent the proud heritage of several generations of the court in Saxony--one of the richest and most aristocratic in Europe. King Augustus III, Elector of Saxony (1733-1765) was chiefly responsible for assembling its unrivalled collections of old master paintings. With his enormous enthusiasm for art, he engaged shrewd connoisseurs and agents to scour Europe and pay extravagant sums for masterpieces. The King even bought whole collections: 100,000 ducats were paid for the great d'Este collection of the Dukes of Modena, which contained one hundred High Renaissance Italian paintings. Many of these are shown here, including Titian's alluring Lady in White and his ineffable Tribute Money, Veronese's glorious Cuccina Family and Marriage Feast at Cana, and Correggio's moving Adoration of the Shepherds--the latter Francesco d'Este's favorite picture. Great Italian works from other sources are Giorgione's Sleeping Venus, and Raphael's Sistine Madonna--a painting that epitomizes the Dresden Gallery. But its riches are not limited to Italian painting. Reproduced here are some of the Gallery's famous Rembrandts, including the multi-figured Wedding Feast of Sampson, the mercilessly realistic Abduction of Ganymede, the fascinating Self-Portrait with a Bittern. Among outstanding examples from other schools and countries shown in these pages are Rubens' opulent Bathsheba at the Fountain, a precious van Eyck altarpiece, three great Poussins, Watteau's engaging Conversation in a Park, a superb Holbein long thought to have been the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Contributing to the highly distinctive character of the Dresden collections are the paintings by artists directly commissioned by the Saxon kings in the urge for princely grandeur. The sixteenth-century court painter Cranach the Elder's noble portraits of Duke Henry the Pious and his wife Duchess Catherine of Mecklenburg, who were major supporters of Luther, bring into focus an historic association. And Bellotto's marvelous cityscapes--commissioned by Augustus III--recreate the eighteenth-century splendor of the Saxon capital. In the introduction, Manfred Bachmann, Director General of the Dresden Paintings Gallery, gives a detailed account of its development form its earliest beginnings in the sixteenth century, its spectacular growth in eighteenth century, the dramatic recovery and restoration of its masterpieces by the Soviet Union in the Second World War, and its energetic programmes of contemporary art acquisitions and cultural activities in the postwar era. -- Inside jacket flaps.