Ghibellines, headed by William of Nogaret, an agent of the king of France, and Sciarra Colonna. The aged pope behaved with great intrepidity, and was subjected to gross indignities during three days by his captors, especially Colonna. At length the people of Anagni rose in a body and rescued him. Boniface went up to Rome, but his proud spirit could not recover the shock which the outrages and insults heaped upon him had occasioned, and he died at Rome soon afterwards in October, 1303.
Boniface IX. (Cardinal Pietro Tomacelli of Naples), was elected during the schism by the cardinals of the Roman obedience on the death of Urban VI. in 1389. He openly testified the exultation which he felt at his election. He was the youngest on the list of cardinals, and though a fluent speaker, could neither write nor chant, and was wholly ignorant of the mode of conducting ecclesiastical affairs. During the whole term of his pontificate, which extended over fifteen years, his efforts were unceasingly directed to the task of extending, by fair means or foul, the Roman obedience, and reducing the power of the French antipopes, his rivals, to the narrowest limits. In the first year of his pontificate, he resorted to the most terrible ecclesiastical censures against the antipope; but Clement retaliated with equal vigour, and the combatants thenceforward seem to have laid aside these ineffectual weapons. Boniface in vain endeavoured to induce the king of France to withdraw his support from the antipope, and transfer it to himself. In 1392, and again in 1394, he sent envoys to Charles VI. for this purpose, but without success. In the last-named year, Benoit XIII. was elected in succession to Clement by the cardinals at Avignon. Disgusted by his duplicity, the French prelates and doctors, at a council held at Paris in 1398, solemnly renounced his obedience, but without recognizing the claims of Boniface. Castile also, in the same year, withdrew its obedience from Benoit. It seems probable, that had the conduct of Boniface been different, the schism might now have been terminated. But his open practice of simony, in its most gross and shameless forms, must have indisposed those princes who had not previously acknowledged him, to admit his claims now for the first time. He is said to have sold the same benefice to several persons on the same day, offering it to each as vacant. This may perhaps explain why the king of France in 1403 restored his obedience to Benoit. England, however, steadily adhered to Boniface, whose claims were ably vindicated in 1399 by the university of Oxford. Germany, also, after the deposition of the Emperor Wenceslaus, and the election of Robert of Bavaria, remained in the Roman obedience. Naples, under King Ladislaus, did the same. Boniface first instituted, in 1399, the annates, or first fruits, by which the first year's revenue of every benefice to which a new incumbent had been appointed, was reserved to the Roman see. In 1404 Benoit sent envoys to Boniface to propose a compromise. The pope gave them a hearing, but insisted that he was the true pope, and his rival an antipope. The envoys retorted that Benoit was at least not simoniacal The excitement produced by this interview aggravated a dangerous malady from which the pope was suffering, and he took to his bed and died shortly after, in October, 1404.—T. A.
BONIFACIO, Baldassare, nephew of Giovanni, was born at Crema about the year 1584. He studied at Pavia, and obtained the degree of doctor of laws in his 19th year. Soon after he went to Germany as secretary to the papal nuncio, John Porzio, and was intrusted with many diplomatic negotiations. Having returned to Italy, he went to Rome, where he entered the church, and was raised to the dignity of archpriest at Rovigo. The university of Padua offered him the professorship of belles-lettres, which he refused, preferring to devote the whole of his time to the cultivation of his own mind. On the following year, however, he yielded to the intreaties of the senate of Venice, which had elected him professor of civil law in the college of the nobles. Pope Urban VIII. had appointed him bishop in the island of Candia, which dignity he did not fill, on account of his unsurmountable aversion to sea voyages, and therefore he preferred the archdeaconry of Treviso, in which city he was the vicar-general under four successive bishops. In 1637 he was called upon by the senate to take the supreme direction of a new college founded at Padua, of which he was the first rector; and finally in 1653 he was created bishop of Capo d'Istria, which see he administered for six years. His works are numerous, but of little interest, except in a historical point of view, being good specimens of the wretched style which prevailed in his time. He published a tragedy, "Amata," which Crescimbeni considers the best of that age; and has left many other historical, juridical, and poetical productions, the most part in Latin, enumerated at length by David Clement in his Bibliothèque Curieuse. Died in 1659.—A. C. M.
BONIFACIO, Giovanni, born of a noble family at Rovigo on the 6th of September, 1547. Having completed his university career at Padua, he studied law for five years, at the end of which period he obtained the degree of LL.D. He continued, however, to cultivate belles-lettres, and particularly poetry. Having married a lady from Treviso, he fixed his residence in that city, and wrote its history. He was appointed to the dignity of assessor in many cities in the Venetian territory; and finally, in 1624, his health requiring some rest, he gave up all his occupations, and retired to his native place. He has left many works, both in Latin and Italian, some very good fables, lectures, orations, and a treatise on jurisdiction, entitled "De Furtis." His most remarkable production is the "History of Treviso," in twelve books. He died on the 23rd of June, 1635.—A. C. M.
BONIFACIO, surnamed Il Veneziano, was born at Venice in 1491, and was a pupil of the elder Palma, and perhaps a student of Titian. His style partook of both manners. His colour is "suave," says Pilkington, using one of his rarest subtleties of phrase, and his compositions abundant and ingenious. "Christ driving the Cheating Tradesmen out of the Temple," was one of his best works; but most of the Venetian churches and sea-girt palaces were adorned by his grand pencil. His "Baptism of Christ," "Sacrifice of Abraham," and "Michael driving out the Evil Spirit," were his choicest marvels. He died in 1553.—W. T.
BONINGTON, Richard Parkes, a landscape painter, son of a drawingmaster, and born at Arnold, near Nottingham, in 1801. Born thus under canvass, he precociously began to sketch almost before he could speak; while still a child he even began to design, which is to drawing what writing is to learning spelling. At seven he drew and sketched with accuracy and taste, guided by his delighted father, who turned him into the fields, as other children are turned into a school-room. Of what is usually called education, and which is often no more fitting to genius than train oil to a canary bird, Bonington had his reasonable modicum. In his thirteenth year a strange Danish thirst for the sea came on the boy, and the green trees of Nottingham grew as hateful to him as London's grey pavements would be to an Arab. He painted the sea before he knew it; he longed to paint it with the fresh salt spray blowing in his face. At home he had no thwarting, no extra stiles put up to make life's road rougher than it need be. At fifteen his father took his son to Paris, and at the Louvre he astonished the quick Gauls by his landscape copies from Poussin and Berghem. At sixteen his works were the admiration of the school, but he would not obey rules. He left the academy as soon as he could draw the living model. The rapid sale of his works kept him too long in Paris. He became a student of the Institute, and drew sometimes in Gros' atelier, poor, wind-bag manufactory that it was Bonington loved river banks and bold sea-shores, where land and sky, cloud and water met. The motion of ships moved him. He portrays fish-markets, and fish with white bellies and green backs quivering on brown and yellow sand. He liked to see the net drawn, and the fish laid in lines on the pebbly water-mark. His second drawing of a marine subject obtained for the clever, unsettled, striving boy a gold medal, at the same time that Sir Thomas got his red ribbon, and Constable and Fielding their golden honours. Then he rose and went to Italy, setting up his easel at Venice, taking short-hand sketches of a city, which he said naively, "seems just going off to sea." His "Ducal Palace" was exhibited at the British gallery, and surprised everybody. "It is," said a connoisseur, "a grand Canaletto-sort of thing, and is as beautiful as sunshine, and as real as Whitehall." Allan Cunningham thought it too much like a surveyor's literalism; but the "Ducal Palace" picture, he says, was true, yet more poetical than Canaletto. Bonington's great fault was imitation, and borrowing other people's spectacles. Like Gainsborough, he was fond of figures, and judicious in their use. In his gardens he had ladies playing on the lute, or listening to night winds, pleasanter than the song of all the birds of day. He had fishermen in barges, and pinnaces full of Fiammettas; but imitate or not, rough English shore or shaven Italian garden, true to his nation, his colouring was always beautiful and poetical. His great ideal was an eclectic one—to combine Dutch fidelity, Roman
