Fiammetta. Paradise

The young Verino became a pupil of Cristoforo Landino. Verino had very high respect for Landino, and his first work, Fiammetta, was almost a tribute to his teacher, being a collection of poems about youthful love (with various other themes, especially in Book Two), greatly influenced by, and often consciously imitating and borrowing from, Landino's own recently reworked Xandra. We can to some extent follow the course of the relationship between Verino and Fiammetta, at least as represented in the poems. Having completed Fiammetta, Verino left love poetry behind as a thing of youth. His extensive output thereafter became more serious, often reflecting his devout piety. His Paradise, a work in obvious debt for its theme to both Vergil (Aeneid 6) and Dante, and influenced a little too by the Somnium Scipionis, the "Dream of Scipio" at the end of Cicero's De Republica. His high regard for the deceased Cosimo, his guide in Heaven, is very evident in Paradise, and in 702-715 he represents himself as having been a good friend of Cosimo's deceased younger son Giovanni de' Medici. Paradise cannot pretend to have any of the depths of Dante, but it provides an interesting and very readable insight into the image that an intelligent, educated, moral, and religious Florentine had of the afterlife in the later fifteenth century. It reflects both Verino's classical learning and his Christian piety, as well as serving to venerate Cosimo. --