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Library Journal Review

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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

The 79 color plates cataloged to a T, plus 30 drawings (five in color) cataloged and reproduced small-scale, a rich bibliography plus a bibliography of Sir Denis Mahon's art historical writings through 1997--all these make this catalog of an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, both pleasurable and useful. The elderly Mahon, heir to the Guiness Mahon Group, willed his private collection, acquired during the 1930s-60s, to several public institutions throughout the UK. Therefore much exhibited and often cataloged works here receive their most polished and coherent treatment to date, following Mahon's own researches and conclusions. The drawings are actually cataloged by Mahon; the paintings primarily by Kitson and Finaldi. Kitson's concise and clear essay compares Mahon to Poussin's intellectual companion Cassiano dal Pozzo for his combination of roles as collector, familiar in places of political power, and writer about art. Moreover, the essay brilliantly surveys the study of Italian Baroque painting from Winckelman and W"offlin, assessing Mahon's not inconsequential place in it as rehabilitator and polemicist for the purely visual distinction of the style. The potentially sticky job of saluting a major donor and documenting a collection, before its limited dispersal, has been done with panache. General; undergraduate; faculty. P. Emison; University of New Hampshire