Virtually all the illustrations attributed to ‘Maffei‘ have counterparts in the four-volume book Gemme antiche figurate (fig. 3; ThesaurusID 1315438) by the Italian antiquarian Paolo Alessandro Maffei (1653–1716), which Montfaucon therefore used extensively as a model for the depiction of engraved gemstones. A few years before the publication of L'antiquité expliquée, Maffei had published Gemme antiche figurate between 1707 and 1709 in collaboration with his Roman publisher Domenico de’ Rossi. [2] As its title suggests, the four volumes contain over 400 illustrations of gemstones, each accompanied by descriptive text. They provide a thematically organized survey of historical portraits, including kings, consuls, and emperors with their consorts, philosophers, historians, and lyric poets, teste incognite, as well as mythological figures, ritual scenes and implements, theatrical masks, and animal motifs. In contrast to Montfaucon’s later method of illustration, Maffei allocated a separate page to each gemstone. Each page also specifies the material of the stone, such as ‘In Corniola‘, ‘In Onice‘, or ‘In Prasma di Smeraldo‘, at the base of the rectangularly framed illustration, along with an explanatory title, for example, ‘ISIDE E SERAPIDE‘, ‘ERCOLE‘, or ‘SISTRO‘ (fig. 4; ThesaurusID 1551643). 

The diverse sizes and styles of the more than 400 gem illustrations in the four volumes is not the only evidence of a compiled collection of various older publications (figs. 5–8).

The wide circulation of the gems in printed form is demonstrated by the numerous reprints and copies of Agostini’s work in the years that followed, even before Maffei prepared his new edition in 1707. The ways in which the individual plates and the depicted gems were modified and underwent changes can be exemplified by the portrait of a young man.

First, in 1685, an edition translated into Latin by the Dutchman Jacobus Gronovius was published in Amsterdam. While it mirrors Agostini’s edition in scope and in the division of 257 plates across two volumes, it features reversed etchings produced by Abraham Blooteling, who also acted as the publisher [7] Abraham Blooteling (figs. 9 and 10). [8]

A parallel edition of the same work was published in the same year by Daniel van Gaasbeeck in Lugdunum Batavorum (Leiden). [9]

In 1686, Giovanni Battista Bussotti’s publishing house in Rome issued a second, revised edition of Agostini’s original copper engravings under the original title Le gemme antiche figurate di Leonardo Agostini, this time entirely curated by Giovanni Pietro Bellori. [10] Bellori, together with Giovanni Battista Marinelli, Michel’Angelo de Marchis, and Luca Corsi, was one of the four executors of Agostini’s estate, and Agostini had entrusted him with the copper plates of Gemme antiche figurate, requesting that Bellori, in collaboration with Marinelli, bring out this new edition. [11] Both complied, with Marinelli contributing only the preface, while Bellori oversaw the revision of the two volumes. [12] In the new edition, Bellori not only redistributed the material more evenly across the two volumes, resulting in 115 plates in the first volume and 151 in the second, but also reorganized and renumbered all plates, finally addressing the imbalance in Agostini’s original edition, where the first volume contained 214 plates and the ‘scarso & inferiore‘ [13] second only 53 plates. [14] Moreover, Bellori modified the captions of several plates, for instance changing ‘PANE‘ to ‘SATIRO‘ or ‘DEIANRIA‘ to ‘ONFALE‘, and in some cases even altered the images themselves. This is illustrated by Agostini’s ‘TESTA INCOGNITA‘ (fig. 9a; ThesaurusID 23933961), where Bellori added a laurel wreath, transforming the portrait of the already mentioned unknown young man into ‘APOLLO‘ in the revised edition (fig. 11; ThesaurusID 23937056).

In 1694 and 1699, a second and third edition of Jacobus Gronovius’ Latin version with the reversed etchings by Blooteling were issued, now published by Leonardus Strik in Franeker in the Netherlands. These editions differ from the previous version only in the revised initials at the beginnings of the texts, while the plates were printed from the unchanged copper plates (figs. 10a, 12 and 13). [15]

In 1702, the Roman publishing house of Giuseppe Monaldi issued an edition in honour of the Príncipe de Santo Buono Carmine Nicolao Caracciolo. Apparently, Monaldi had come into possession of Bellori’s revised copper plates from 1686 and reused them in the same condition. In any case, no differences can be observed in the gem illustrations compared to that edition (figs. 9b, 11a and 14). [16]

In contrast to the editions mentioned above, Maffei undertook a far more extensive revision of Bellori’s 1686 edition of Agostini’s Gemme antiche figurate. To this substantial core of 253 plates, he added a number of plates that had long been held in De’ Rossi’s collection from the series of engravings after the gems of the sixteenth-century Grimani collection –  comprising 38 plates – as well as three plates first published in 1627 by Pietro Stefanoni. [17] These reprints of copper plates acquired by De’ Rossi were further supplemented by 121 entirely new engravings by Francesco Faraone Aquila (c. 1676–1740), depicting additional gems from Roman and other collections. While the Aquila, Stefanoni, and Grimani gems were explained solely through Maffei’s sposizioni, in his commentary on Agostini's gems he first provided the descriptions and notes written by Bellori in italics (‘per non defraudare il Bellori, o sia l’Agostini, della gloria acquistatasi in quest’opera‘ [18]), and then supplemented them with his own osservazioni.

Since Maffei rearranged the plates taken from Bellori's Agostini edition within his four-volume work, he had them renumbered and, in some cases, also changed the captions. The ‘APOLLO’ now appears unchanged in the image, but with a newly reinforced frame on plate 42 of the Parte seconda (figs. 9c, 11b, 14a and 15; ThesaurusID 23925596). [19]

In contrast to Maffei, Montfaucon was neither able nor willing to draw on existing copper plates for his L’antiquité. Instead, he selected, copied, and composed all the motifs for his more than 1,100 plates in the manner described above (fig. 15a; ThesaurusID 23925596 and fig. 16; ThesaurusID 23919968).

According to the research summarised here, of the total of 214 gem illustrations with the source reference ‘Maffei’, 102 are based on illustrations that Giovanni Battista Galestruzzi had produced for Leonardo Agostini sixty-two and fifty years earlier, respectively. [20] Since their first use in 1657 and 1669, the copper plates have undergone various states and reproductions over the years until Montfaucon made his copies in 1719 (fig. 17).

Tracing the engravings back to Agostini also makes it possible to identify some – currently around 73 – of the 214 gems depicted by Montfaucon in today's collections: A large part of Agostini's former gem collection is now housed in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze and the Tesoro dei Granduchi in Florence, after Agostini was able to sell a large part of his collection to Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici with the help of Ottavio Falconieri shortly before his death around 1670. [21] These include, for example, an intaglio and a cameo, each with a portrait of Athena (figs. 18–22; ThesaurusID 24010504 and figs. 23–27; ThesaurusID 24010516).