Sir Denis Mahon built up a considerable reputation both as a collector of Italian Baroque paintings and was a scholar on the subject. He bought them before they had really "taken off" on the market, and now they are ultrafashionable and almost unobtainable - a boom which began with the Caravaggio revival, and continued with the renewal of interest in the Caracci brothers.
So the paintings from his collection which are now hanging in our National Gallery are an event in themselves, as well as filling certain gaps in the gallery's collection. For a long time Baroque was despised as decadent and meretricious; now it is very much back, and in an almost uncritical sense. Like most dominant styles through the ages, it contains extremes of good and bad, and many of the great Baroque artists were more convincing as decorators than as easel painters. The most striking work of the lot, to my eyes, is the Luca Giordano canvas entitled Venus, Mars and the Forge of Vulcan, a hackneyed theme but Giordano has artfully divided it into two contrasting halves. The influence of Rubens is almost too obvious, but it is used creatively, not slavishly, and the picture is richly and solidly painted - unusually so for Giordano, nicknamed Luca Fa-Presto, or Luke Do-it-Quick, for his rapid virtuosity. In particular, the fall of light on Venus's satiny body is beautifully rendered.
Two pictures by Guercino show him as stylistically somewhere between Bolognese classicism and the dramatic (or melodramatic) chiaroscuro of Caravaggio. That is to say, he is an eclectic, though a thoroughly capable one with a strong, rather operatic sense of composition. A Magdalen by Domenichino is typically restrained, sensitive and rather melancholy, like his own temperament, though he had considerable gifts as a colourist. Domenichino, in fact, seems to me the real classicist of Italian Baroque, a man born out of his time, looking backward to Raphael and forward to the 19th century.
There is another and contrasting Magdalen - a theme much favoured, because it enabled painters to depict a beautiful woman while pointing a moral - by Guido Reni, apparently a late work. His female penitent is curiously pallid, waxy and doll-like, but in a sense Reni was edging towards a new neo-classicism and the painting looks forward to Canova or even Ingres. This does not exhaust the Magdalen theme; there is yet another canvas showing her in a pastoral landscape, supposedly by Annibale Carracci. The remaining two pictures are of lesser interest - a Biblical scene by the Frenchman Sebastien Bourdon, which is rather Poussinesque but more diffuse, and a Landscape With St Bruno In Ecstasy by Piero Francesco Mola. Here we are close to the wild, "picturesque" style of Salvator Rosa and also to later Tenebrists such as Magnasco.
Until January 31st.