Paolo Alessandro Maffei

[5] Maffei's name is familiar to art historians today because, when the entrepreneurial printer-publisher Domenico de' Rossi published a collection of engravings of ancient and modern Roman sculpture, Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne (Rome, 1704),[6] he turned to the well-known antiquarian for suitably learned descriptive text, for what was in effect the first eighteenth-century art book, whose refined engravings by French artists were designed to appeal to the cognoscenti.

[7] The lavish folio volumes concentrated on the best-known ancient sculptures, with a handful of modern ones in prominent collections, and some antiquities that were interesting to the enlightened amateur largely for their attributed subject matter.

Three further volumes on similar principles followed, concerned with engraved gems, a notable field for aristocratic collectors (and one rife with excellent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fakes), Gemme antiche figurate date in luce da Domenico de' Rossi colle sposizioni di Paolo Alessandro Maffei, (Rome 1707).

Rossi may have been inspired by Mattei's copious notes contributed, under the name Paolo Antoniano, to the more erudite volume on the satires of "Quintus Settanus", the pseudonym of Lodovico Sergardi, Satyrae, numero auctae mendes purgatae & singulae locupletiores... (Rome 1700).

[2] A fire consumed all his library and his literary correspondence with other erudite Europeans, among whom was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,[2] with the result that, as a man of letters, he is remembered largely for the notes in the commercial enterprise of the Raccolta di Statue.