Enciclopedia Cattolica

MAZZUCHELLI, GIAMMARIA

Volume VIII · p. 330 · 1952

English translation · Testo originale italiano

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

MAZZUCHELLI, Giammaria. - Brescian patrician, scholar and bibliophile, b. 28 Oct. 1707, d. 19 Nov. 1765 (not 1768, as sometimes stated).

Article illustration
MAZZONI, Guido – Deposizione. Polychrome terracotta – Ferrara, church of S. Maria della Rosa.

The pathetic Pietà with its mountainous, wooded backdrop and the exceedingly intricate Massacre of the Innocents (in the upper right corner, a Rest in Egypt of rare idyllic refinement), alternating harsh chromatic contrasts

Author of celebrated monographs on Archimedes (1737) and Pietro Aretino (1741), his name is chiefly associated with the great bio-bibliographical dictionary Gli scrittori d’Italia, left unfinished. Of this work, marked by vast and scrupulous erudition, the letters A and B were published in 6 vols. (Brescia 1753–63). The letter C and all other manuscripts of Mazzuchelli are preserved in the Vatican Library, to which they were donated (1866) by the author’s great-nephew.

In the ancestral palace Count Mazzuchelli founded in 1738 an academy that held serious and well-attended scholarly meetings. The dissertations, on literary, scientific, historical, theological and philosophical topics, were published in 1765.

BIBL.: E. Narducci, Intorno alla vita del conte G. M. ed alla collezione de’ suoi manoscritti ora posseduta dalla Biblioteca Vaticana, in Giornale arcaico, 198 (1865), Rome 1867, pp. 1–79; D. Bulferetti, Comment. del conte G. M. M. nell’occasione del suo biennale, in Comment. dell’Athene vente, 2 (1908), pp. 46–62; C. Castelli, Il conte G. M. e Gli scrittori d’Italia, in L’Arcadia, 3 (1918), pp. 319–36; G. Frank, Voltaire to M., in Modern language notes, 57 (1942), pp. 355–56.