Mark Antony de, archbishop of Spalatro, in Dalmatia, at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, was a man whose fickleness in religion proved his ruin. His preferment, instead of attaching him to the church of Rome, rendered him disaffected to it. Having become acquainted with the English bishop Bedell, whilst chaplain to Sir Henry Wotton, ambassador from James I. at Venice, he communicated to that prelate his books De Republica Ecclesiastica, which were afterwards published at London, with Bedell's corrections. He came to England with Bedell, where he was received with great respect, and preached and wrote against the Roman Catholic religion. He is said to have had a principal hand in publishing Father Paul's History of the Council of Trent, at London, which was inscribed to James in 1619. But on the promotion of Pope Gregory XIV., who had been his school-fellow and old acquaintance, he was deluded by Gondomar the Spanish ambassador into the hopes of procuring a cardinal's hat, by which he fancied he should prove an instrument of great reformation to the church. Accordingly he returned to Rome in 1622, recanted his errors, and was at first well received; but he afterwards wrote letters to England recanting his recantation, and these being intercepted, he was imprisoned by Pope Urban VIII. and died in 1625. He was also the author of the first philosophical explanation of the rainbow, which before his time was regarded as a prodigy.