Matteo Palmieri
Matteo di Marco Palmieri (1406–1475) was a
Biography
Palmieri was born to a middle-class family who held prominent positions in the city. He was educated in Florence and ran a profitable apothecary shop; like his father he pursued a career in civil service, becoming a well known and respected public official between 1432 and 1475 holding many posts and titles.[1]
At the end of his life, he commissioned from the Florentine painter Francesco Botticini (1446–1498) a monumental Assumption of the Virgin[3] for the church of the Benedictine nunnery of San Pier Maggiore in Florence, where the Palmieri had their chapel; in the painting are the kneeling donor portraits of Matteo and his wife Niccolosa de' Serragli.[4]
Works
Palmieri firmly believed in the humanist ideal that
In Italian Palmieri wrote a three-book poem La città di vita ("The City of Life") in 1465, which is an imitation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. The poem was unpublished in his lifetime, and upon its appearance in print was condemned by the Church as heretical, thus after his death Palmieri's body was removed from the Church of San Pier Maggiore and an effigy of him was burned.[1]
Palmieri's best-known work as a humanist is Della vita civile ("On Civic Life"; printed 1528), composed in 1429 and circulated between 1435 and 1440.
Notes
- ^ ISBN 0-684-80514-6
- ^ Published as Vite di uomini illustri del secolo xv by Ludovico Frati, Bologna, 1892-93; a translation was reprinted as The Vespasiano Memoirs: Lives of Illustrious Men of the XV Century (Renaissance Society of America Reprint Texts) 1997.
- National Gallery, London.
- ^ Rolf Bagemihl, "Francesco Botticini's Palmieri Altar-Piece", The Burlington Magazine 138 No. 1118 (May 1996), pp. 308-314.
- ^ Specifics are discussed in Claudio Finzi, Matteo Palmieri: dalla 'Vita Civile' alla 'Cittàdi Vita' (Rome) 1984.
External links
- De temporibus by Matteo Palmieri (1459), digitized codex, at Somni