Francesco Maffei

Francesco Maffei worked away from Venice itself, in the smaller towns of its mainland, and painted in a manner all his own. He trained in Vicenza, his birthplace, probably under the local Mannerist Alessandro Maganza, then around 1638 went to Venice and took up the free brushwork of incomers like the Genoese Bernardo Strozzi and the German Johann Liss.

What came out was strange and electric. His figures have blurred, shifting edges, his brushstrokes flicker nervously, and sudden flares of bright colour give his religious and civic pictures a restless, almost feverish air. He filled churches and town halls across the Veneto with them, working through the 1640s and 1650s on the Rotonda church at Rovigo. He died in Padua in 1660.