His endeavors to reform the church soon brought him into conflict with his suffragans; and the interference of the papal court with his rights as metropolitan, an attitude intensified by the quarrel between the Papacy and Venice, made his position intolerable.

That fact, combined with a correspondence with Paolo Sarpi and conflicts with his clergy and fellow bishops, which culminated in the loss of an important financial case in the Roman Curia, led to the resignation of his office in favor of a relative and his retirement to Venice.

Threatened by the Inquisition, he prepared to apostatize, entered into communication with the English ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, and having been assured of a welcome, left for England in 1616.

Contemporary writers give no pleasant account of him, describing him as fat, irascible, pretentious and very avaricious; but his ability was undoubted, and in the theological controversies of the time he soon took a foremost place.

The king's anger was aroused when De Dominis announced his intention (16 January 1622), and Star-Chamber proceedings for illegal correspondence with Rome were threatened.

His heresy was declared manifest, and by order of the Inquisition his body was taken from the coffin, dragged through the streets of Rome, and publicly burned in the Campo di Fiore together with his works, on 21 December 1624.

[5] By a strange irony, the publication of his Reditus consilium was subsequently forbidden in Venice because of its uncompromising advocacy of the supremacy of the Pope over the temporal powers.

[3] In 1611 he published, at Venice, a scientific work entitled: Tractatus de radiis visus et lucis in vitris, perspectivis et iride, in which, according to Isaac Newton, he was the first to develop the theory of the rainbow by drawing attention to the fact that in each raindrop the light undergoes two refractions and an intermediate reflection.

In the main it is an elaborate treatise on the historic organization of the church, its principal note being its insistence on the divine prerogatives of the Catholic episcopate as against the encroachments of the papal monarchy.