Portrait of Pope Boniface VIII

Boniface VIII belonged to a far older world than most of the faces around him; he was pope from 1294 and died in 1303, three centuries before this copy was made. He proclaimed the first great Jubilee in 1300, drawing crowds of pilgrims to Rome, and he pushed the claims of the papacy over kings as far as they would go. That brought him into a bitter fight with Philip IV of France, whose men seized the old pope at Anagni in 1303, an episode Italians long remembered as an outrage. Dante, who loathed him, all but promised him a place in Hell while he was still alive. No painter of the 1290s left a reliable likeness, so this face is a later age imagining a medieval enemy.