Discovering Italian Baroque.The Denis Mahon Collection

This gorgeous book fully catalogues for the first time Sir Denis Mahon`s entire collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian paintings-a collection recognized as one of the most impressive in the world. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Mahon, a scholar, collector, and London National Gallery trustee, acquired seventy-nine Italian Baroque works and played a fundamental role in changing perceptions of art of this period.

Not only is Denis Mahon a preeminent and pioneering student and collector of Italian Baroque painting and drawing, he has played a critical role in the revival of the appreciation, collecting, and exhibition of this powerful but previously neglected area of the Italian artistic tradition. This excellent scholarly catalog of a show at London's National Gallery, where Finaldi is a curator, handsomely reproduces and explicates Mahon's exquisite holdings of paintings by Albani, the Carracci, da Cortona, Domenichino, Giordano, Reni, and Sacchi. It also contains his own carefully documented sampling of Guercino drawings. Prefacing this well-wrought catalog of 79 paintings and 30 drawings, British art historian Kitson's essay neatly delineates the critical ebb and flow surrounding the appreciation of the Baroque, Mahon's personal art historical methodology, and his career as a scholar, collector, and advocate for the arts. A necessary acquisition for scholarly art history collections.?Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.