With scarcely less of tragic force and direct solemnity does Rossetti carry this thought of retribution into the world of mediæval Italy, into the cycle of legend and romance that gathers round the name of Dante. The love-story of “Paolo and Francesca da Rimini,” recorded by Dante in the “Divina Comedia,” has been the theme of poets and painters for many a year, and is the subject of one of the finest water-colour drawings made in Rossetti’s transition period. Francesca, the wife of Lanciotto, the deformed son of the lord of Rimini, fell in love with her husband’s brother Paolo; and Lanciotto, discovering the two in guilty companionship, put them both to death. In the fifth canto of the “Inferno,” Dante describes the terrible sight permitted to him of the condemned lovers in the second circle of Hell. Rossetti’s picture is in triptych form, and in the centre are the figures of Dante and Virgil, his guide. Above them is the brief inscription, “O Lasso!” In the left compartment is depicted the fatal embrace of Paolo and Francesca at the moment of the avowal of their love, when in reading together the story of Lancelot, the book suddenly fell from their hands, and, as the narrator simply confesses, “that day we read no more.” In the right-hand space are seen the lovers, clasping each other wildly in the darkness and among the furious storms of hell, unable to release themselves from that fixed embrace. The characteristic idea of making the penalty consist in the involuntary perpetuation of the sin,—the guilty love becoming, as it were, its own sufficient punishment, belongs, of course, to Dante, but is worked out with singular power in Rossetti’s design. Not only is the stern and relentless fate portrayed with the utmost sincerity in the sequel, but even in the first panel the thought of the coming retribution is finely suggested by the introduction of one sufficient touch at the background of the scene. Beneath the edge of a curtain is seen the foot of the approaching husband, bringing his vengeance and the lovers’ doom. The same subject has been more elaborately and completely treated by Mr. G.F. Watts, whose picture shows Francesca telling her sad tale to Dante and Virgil as they pass; and the poet who is said to have known her on earth, and to have written the record quoted from the “Inferno” in the house at Rimini in which she was born, is depicted sinking in a swoon before her, overcome with pity and with awe.