Short answers, pulled from the story.
Matteo di Marco Palmieri (1406-1475) was a Florentine humanist, historian, and civil servant best known for his treatise Della vita civile, which advocated civic humanism and helped refine the Tuscan vernacular to the level of Latin. He served Florence in numerous public posts from 1432 to 1475 and was included by Vespasiano da Bisticci among the illustrious men of the fifteenth century.
Della vita civile is a treatise composed in 1429 and first printed in 1528, written as a series of dialogues in four books set in a country house in Mugello during the plague of 1430. It discusses the physical and intellectual development of children, the moral life of a citizen, and the tension between self-interest and honesty, drawing on Quintilian's Institutio oratoria and Cicero's De officiis.
Palmieri's poem Città di vita, completed in 1465 and modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy, was condemned as heretical when it appeared in print after his death. As a consequence, his body was removed from the Church of San Pier Maggiore in Florence and an effigy of him was burned.
Palmieri commissioned a monumental Assumption of the Virgin from the Florentine painter Francesco Botticini (1446-1498). The work was made for the church of the Benedictine nunnery of San Pier Maggiore in Florence and includes kneeling donor portraits of Matteo and his wife Niccolosa de' Serragli.
Palmieri wrote the Liber de temporibus, a universal chronicle from creation to his own day; the De captivitate liber, an account of the Florentine capture of Pisa in 1406; and a biography of Niccolò Acciaioli, which was translated into Italian by Donato Acciaioli.
Palmieri was sent as Florentine ambassador to the court of Alfonso I of Naples. He also served in numerous civic posts in Florence continuously from 1432 until his death in 1475.