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Updated: May 21, 2025
His first works, indeed, seem in truth as if done by a melancholic, being full of effort and executed with much patience and expenditure of time. But let us come to his works, leaving aside those that are not worthy of attention; in his youth he painted in fresco at Volterra the façade of M. Mario Maffei, in chiaroscuro, which gave him a good name and won him much credit.
After Maffei came Metastasio and Alfieri; the first before the middle, and the other in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
Assuming the corrected date of 1260 as the commencement of the first journey of Nicolo and Maffei Polo, this will appear to be consonant with the chronology of the princes with whose reigns their travels were connected; while the date of 1250, adopted by Ramusio and Muller, is totally irreconcilable with the truth of history.
Verona has a pure and clear air, and, as I am informed, a great deal of good company. Marquis Maffei, alone, would be worth going there for. The amphitheatre at Verona is worth your attention; as are also many buildings there and at Vicenza, of the famous Andrea Palladio, whose taste and style of buildings were truly antique.
He also painted several portraits for the Maffei, and among others one of himself, which was afterwards presented to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and placed in the Royal Gallery at Florence. Salvator Rosa's confidence in his own powers was as frankly confessed as it was justified by success.
Still we must not forget that the piece belongs only in a very small measure to Voltaire. How much he has borrowed from Maffei, and changed not always for the better has been already pointed out by Lessing.
Nevertheless, he very willingly embraced the friendship of those whose learned and cultivated conversation could be of profit to his mind, and in whom some beams of genius shone forth: as, for example, the most reverend and illustrious Monsignor Pole, for his rare virtues and singular goodness; and likewise the most reverend, my patron, Cardinal Crispo, in whom he discovered, beside his many excellent qualities, a distinguished gift of acute judgment; he was also warmly attached to the Cardinal of S. Croce, a man of the utmost gravity and wisdom, whom I have often heard him name in the highest terms; and to the most reverend Maffei, whose goodness and learning he has always praised: indeed, he loves and honours all the dependants of the house of Farnese, owing to the lively memory he cherishes of Pope Paul, whom he invariably mentions with the deepest reverence as a good and holy old man; and in like manner the most reverend Patriarch of Jerusalem, sometime Bishop of Cesena, has lived for some time in close intimacy with him, finding peculiar pleasure in so open and generous a nature.
Zeno, Maffei, and Muratori also distinguished themselves in the art of criticism, and by their works aided in overthrowing the school of Marini.
"The Merope of Maffei, the Saul of Alfieri, the Aristodemus of Monti, and particularly the poem of Dante, although this last author never composed a tragedy, seem calculated to convey an idea of what the dramatic art might be brought to in Italy.
Merille and Muraire, in the "Journal de Medicine," for February and May, 1783. The researches of Maffei and Fontana have thrown some light upon this subject. The shock which this disastrous occurrence occasioned to my mother, was the foundation of a disease which carried her, in a few months, to the grave.
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