Besides coining money and designing medals for Giovanni Bentivoglio, Francia showed his fine taste and artistic powers in many works both in gold and silver enamels, and especially in _niello_, “often introducing as many as twenty figures of excellent proportion and graceful design into a space scarcely two fingers high.” Most of these precious works of art perished in the destruction of the Bentivogli’s palace at the time of their expulsion, and the famous silver _pax_, which Francia executed at immense cost for the wedding of Giovanni Sforza and Lucrezia Borgia, has disappeared, but two smaller ones are still preserved in the Gallery of Bologna, and are interesting specimens of their kind. One bearing a representation of the Resurrection, surrounded by a wreath of delicate foliage, was executed on the occasion of the marriage of Bartolommeo Felicini and Dorotea Ringhieri, as we learn by the arms of these families which are engraved upon the work. The other is engraved with the Sforza and Bentivogli arms and the letters M. Z., _Messer Zoane_, and was probably a wedding gift from Giovanni Bentivoglio to his bride Ginevra Sforza. The Crucifixion is worked in niello on this pax, and both in the sorrowing angels hovering round the cross and in the saints below we recognise the type of head which Francia’s Madonnas have rendered familiar, while the landscape in the background shows the pictorial bent of the goldsmith’s mind. Andrea Mantegna’s visit to Bologna in 1472 is said to have first inspired Francia with the wish to become a painter, but Vasari tells us in the same breath that our master’s first painting was not executed until 1490, when he was forty years old.