The Colonna family is certainly one of the most important in Rome and in Italy, but not all its branches were equally prosperous. Sciarra Colonna, a passionate Ghibelline, who made Boniface VIII the prisoner of the Agnani, and got carried away, in the ecstasy of his victory, to the point of slapping the Supreme Pontiff, was made to suffer cruelly for his violence under John XXII. He was exiled from Rome for life in 1328, had his children stripped of their nobility as was he, and all his worldly goods confiscated to enrich Stefano Colonna, his brother, who had never abandoned the party of the Guelphs. The descendants of the unfortunate Sciarra died, as he himself did, in Venice, in obscurity and poverty. By 1444 only one of them was left alive to inherit such misery. Francesco Colonna, born at the start of that year was twice made an orphan, losing his father, killed on the day before he was born, and his mother who died giving birth to him. Francesco, piously adopted by none other than Jacopo Bellini, the famous history painter, and tenderly brought up with his own children, showed himself worthy of the generous care he had had from his adoptive father and from the illustrious brothers of the latter, Giovanni and Gentile Bellini. From the age of eighteen onwards, he repeated in the history of painting the precocious triumphs of the young Mantegna: Giotto had another rival. Fate, however, which did not cease to dog Francesco's life, did not allow his young successes to be wreathed in glory, and it is under the name of Mantegna or one of the Bellinis that the masterpieces of his brush are admired today.