Who knows when the last time was that a commercial gallery organized an old master retrospective as ambitious as Procaccini in America at Hall & Knight? It would do credit to pretty much any museum, including the museums that lent pictures to it.

Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1574-1625) was born in Bologna into a family of artists, moved to Milan and went to Genoa, where he was transformed by seeing Rubens, among other things. His style changed from Mannerist to Baroque. Pictures stuffed with figures in contrived poses, carefully finished, give way to swiftly done scenes of high drama and deep feeling, by turns violent and sensual. Speed became a measure of his virtuosity. Procaccini's patrons record that he painted pictures for them in a couple of days, as if that were a feat.

This show includes paintings by him from American collections. Until the 1960's few people had heard of Procaccini even in Italy. Then in the early 1970's an exhibition of Lombard painting, which traveled from Italy to Britain, piqued the interest of curators and collectors. For a while, during the late 70's and early 80's, in the way that fashion operates even with old masters, American museums became keen to buy Procaccinis. Most of the dozen pictures in this show were bought then.

One that wasn't, Procaccini's Ecstasy of the Magdalen, was sold by Hall & Knight this year to the National Gallery in Washington.

Some of these works turned out to be so large (the Met's painting is almost nine feet high) that the stairwell banisters in Hall & Knight's townhouse had to be temporarily removed to squeeze the pictures into the building. Mr. Hall said it was fortunate no other painting by Procaccini is in America because it wouldn't fit into the gallery. He wasn't kidding. But the result turns out to be ideal. Some artists benefit from understatement. Procaccini is one.

It's a connoisseur's treat, which...should [not] discourage the rest of us from appreciating the art's more obvious characteristics.

Procaccini was a learned painter of intense and eccentric gifts, melding diverse influences. On the one hand, there is the Met's Mannerist Madonna and Child With St. Francis and St. Dominic and Angels, a stiff composition of tight construction and complex layering in shallow space, alluding to Parmigianino. On the other, there is Ecce Homo, from Dallas, broadly brushed, fully Baroque, with its echoes of Titian and Tintoretto, a deep, angular swirl of dark, gesticulating figures punctuated by the bright red robe of Jesus.

Procaccini progressed toward a style of increasing and varied theatricality. His early Coronation of the Virgin a tentative picture of brittle charm, with tiny brushstrokes like faceted stone, led to The Martyrdom of St. Agnes, saccharine with its rosy-cheeked heroine, but already with bravura flourishes, as in the figure of a foreshortened angel; then came Martyrdom of St. Justina, suavely painted in gold and umber, with the twisting figure of the beautiful saint balletically entwined with her hideous murderer.

Like Leonardo da Vinci, Procaccini loved contrasting caricatures: Jesus, in The Capture of Christ, with a grotesque Judas; Judith, in Judith With the Head of Holofernes, with Abra, her maid.

It is remarkable that Procaccini is believed to have painted this work around the time he painted The Ecstasy of the Magdalen. Hovering angels play music for the bare-breasted Magdalen, who gazes rhapsodically up at them, supported by robust putti. This is gorgeous painting, not awkward like Judith, and sexual without being explicitly erotic like Venus and Amor, another work said to be from the same moment.

The Holy Family With the Infant St. John and an Angel, from Kansas City, is perhaps the quintessential Procaccini: a knot of shadowy bodies crowd forward around the brightly illuminated Virgin and child, with one figure, in the darkness, cut off by the top of the picture. The work is freely, briskly painted, wet into wet, the surface lush, the colors rich and haunting: a painter's painting by an old master generously retrieved from obscurity by this gem of a show.