Several pages were damaged in 1557 when the Arno flooded the city, and then with other precious documents it was removed to the Laurentian Library. There it was locked up in a cupboard, of which the librarian was not allowed to have the key lest his soul might be contaminated by the odious heresies contained in its pages. The heretical manuscript, with its dainty, imaginative illuminations of the signs of the Zodiac, is now one of the treasures of the library, and on its last page is the portrait of the author, showing a strong, bony and clever face of true Florentine type. According to Vasari, Sandro Botticelli painted a picture for the altar of the Palmieri chapel in San Pier Maggiore “with an infinite number of figures, being the Assumption of our Lady, with the zones of the heavens, the Patriarchs, the Prophets, the Apostles, the Evangelists, the Martyrs, the Confessors, the Doctors, the Virgins and the Hierarchies; all after the design given him by Matteo, who was a man of letters and of learning: and he executed the work after a masterly fashion and with extreme diligence. He portrayed Matteo and his wife kneeling at the foot of the picture. But although this work was most beautiful and ought to have been above envy, there were some malicious and evil-speaking persons who being unable to abuse it in other ways, said Matteo and Sandro had fallen into the grave sin of heresy; let none expect an opinion from me as to whether this be true or not; enough that the figures painted by Sandro are in truth worthy of praise for the great work he had in designing the circles of the heavens and fitting foreshortenings and landscapes in divers different ways between the figures and the angels; everything being excellently well drawn.”[1] Eventually the picture was carried to Villa Palmieri and walled up until the beginning of this century when it was taken out of its hiding-place and sold. At length it passed into the collection of the Duke of Hamilton and in 1882 was bought for our National Gallery. Father Ricca in his exhaustive work on the churches of Florence devotes a whole chapter to this “much-to-be-praised” picture and to the _Città di Vita_. “In these cantos,” says the Jesuit father, “when talking of the angels he [Matteo] follows the condemned opinions of Origen, more from a poetic license than from any theological bias, and supposes that our bodies are inhabited by those angels who are falsely thought to have remained neutral when Lucifer fell; and that God, desirous to try them once more, obliges them to adopt our human bodies. This is the real story of Matteo’s book, which has been altered and corrupted by malevolent and ignorant persons, whose calumnies and lies have been believed even by ultra-montane writers, so that Germany, France and England, were filled with the rumour thereof.”[2]