CRISTOFORO LANDINO (1424-1504) - a Florentine humanist, among the most renowed of his time, was entrusted the reading of poetry and rhetoric in the Studio of Florence in 1458. He very probably had to meet some hostility on the course of his didactic activity, and was contested by groups of his disciples, who would have rather preferred a "more up to date" tutor, whose teaching methods "had to be inspired to that severe rigorous philologic way, already prevailing on the empiricism of the old humanistic school" to which nostalgic Landino seemed to be excessively bound at.
He enjoyed however quite important honorary appointments, being Tutor at de' Medicis', Chancellor on the Guelph behalf, writer of Public Letters for the Governing Council. Author of a Latin elegy collection, he particularly devoted himself to some "commentaries" dealing with the works of Virgil, Horace and Dante.
With Lorenzo de' Medici, he was a defender of the vulgar tongue dignity, and from his professorial chair he read Dante and Petrarca, being him the strongest upholder of the value of the Poet, in the Florence of the second 15th century. The "commentary" about the Comedy, which he exhibited as a manuscript to the Governing Council in 1481, with illustrations by Sandro Botticelli, (comprehensive of etchings, copper-plate engraving) mostly drawn up on previous comment schemes, is not esteemed as a work of primary weight by critics, for the rendering of the poem itself, but it represents a valid document on the refined culture of that time.
(Source: www.intelliganza.it/sardini/Sardini_Editrice/English.html)