It's like something out of a movie - somewhere between Indiana Jones and Les Miserables. The year is 287, on the dark winter night of Jan. 20. The place is the Cloaca Maxima, the main sewer of ancient Rome. And we have a scorpion's-eye view, squinting through the darkness, of a puzzling event.

A band of imperial soldiers is heaving the corpse of a young man into the sewer. Light and shadows dance incoherently over the scene, but with some struggle we can make out the players.

The large (about two and a half meters wide) painting by Ludovico Carracci, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, is a unique depiction of the fate of one of the Catholic Church's most beloved saints, Sebastian.

The picture is among 43 featured in "Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna, 1575-1725." This exhibit, gathering artworks from the Dresden Picture Gallery in Germany with others from Southern California collections, showcases the central role that art from the northern Italian city of Bologna played in the Catholic Reform.

Religious patrons around 1600 were keen to have images that would remind everyone of the Roman martyrs who had died for their faith to build the Church during the first three centuries of persecution. Sebastian was one of the military saints known as "athletes of God."

Sebastian, a captain in the Praetorian Guard, was caught encouraging his fellow Christians to refuse to worship pagan gods. The Emperor Diocletian ordered him executed for this betrayal, and most images of the saint show him bound to a tree and shot full of arrows. But the youth miraculously recovered and defied Diocletian again.

He was beaten to death and the body dumped in the sewer in hopes that the Christians would not recover the relics. Sebastian appeared in a dream to St. Lucina and told her where to look.

Fast-forward some 1,300 years, to 1608. A tiny church, San Bastianello, has stood for centuries over the very spot where St. Lucina found Sebastian's remains, but it is razed to make way for the splendid Sant'Andrea della Valle, church of the Theatines, a new religious order that arose to combat the teachings of Martin Luther.

With Catholic missionaries facing martyrdom in northern Europe and all over the world, a reform school of art led by the Carracci family of Bologna --- including Ludovico's cousins, Annibale and Agostino --- is making dramatic religious pictures designed to reach the emotions of worshippers.

The artists use deep colors, strong contrasts of light and dark, touching details from everyday life, and sweeping diagonal movements.

At Sant'Andrea della Valle, Sebastian's cult will be kept alive in a grotto reached by a spiral staircase leading down from the opulent family chapel of Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII. In 1612 Maffeo pays the leading artist of Bologna, Ludovico Carracci, to paint "St. Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima."

"It is worth imagining the painting in the underground chapel, reached by cramped spiral stairs, weakly lit by candles and on the very spot where Sebastian's body was dumped," writes art historian Charles Dempsey.

"In the confined space of the chapel, the life-sized figures would have seemed even more to press forward toward the spectator. Ludovico pushed the action, the dead body, right up to the front plane of the picture, and the soldiers pulling at the shroud to tip the body over the ledge create a sense of momentum so the corpse seems to be rolling out into the chapel."

Ludovico's picture never took its intended place, however. The grotto and staircase could not be built, and Cardinal Maffeo took the painting into his private collection, erecting a niche with a far tamer image of Sebastian in the Barberini chapel. As decades wore on, the beautiful canvas with its odd subject no longer fit the tastes of the times, and it was re-titled in the later 17th century to make it seem to be a subject from ancient mythology.

The exhibit will be at the Getty until May 3, and can be previewed online at http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/captured_emotions/. Additional information: (310) 440-7300.