In the “Deposition,” painted soon after 1500 for the Benedictines of Parma, his style is already powerfully affected by this contact with Raphael, which can alone account for a vigorous action and dramatic character here displayed. A deep emotion is visible on the faces of the St. John, who supports the head, the Magdalen, who embraces the feet, and the Virgin, who gazes at the dead face of her son with the grief-stricken look which the “Pietà” of the National Gallery has stamped upon our minds. Salome, who stands behind, flings aloft her arms in an energy of despair unlike anything else that Francia ever conceived, while in the background the cross lifts its gaunt form against the glowing tints of an evening sky and a soft distance of cypress-grown rocks and far-away hills. Not many years afterwards Francia was asked by a noble of Lucca to supply an altar-piece for the church of San Frediano in that city, and after painting a “Madonna and Saints” as the principal subject, took the Pietà as the motive of the lunette below. This time he returned partly to his former conception, and represented the Dead Christ laid in his mother’s arms in the same attitude as in the larger Deposition at Parma, but with two angels instead of attendant saints at the head and feet. In later years the altar-piece passed into the Duke of Lucca’s hands, and coming to England in 1840 with the rest of the collection, became one of the chief ornaments of the National Gallery. It is difficult to approach this Pietà in a critical spirit. We have known it all our lives, every form, almost every line of the well-known group is familiar. To many of us it is associated with memories of days long ago when it formed a part of our earliest religious ideas; and when much of the faith of childhood has undergone change, it still recalls all that was purest and best in those first impressions. [Illustration: THE VIRGIN AND TWO ANGELS WEEPING OVER THE DEAD BODY OF CHRIST. A PIETÀ. BY FRANCIA. _In the National Gallery._] What is it, we ask, which touches us in this “Pietà,” that has appealed to thousands in a way which no other picture has ever done? Surely, not only the grace of its composition, the tender brightness of its colouring, but more than all of these the deep human pathos which we find there blended with a real and living hope. It is the contrast between the mother mourning over her dead son with a grief that cannot be comforted and the angels who fold their hands in lowly adoration, and by their presence transform the saddest of all scenes into a divine mystery full of hope and love. Mary, in the bitterness of her sorrow, is unconscious of these heavenly attendants, her eyes, fixed on the dead face of her son, are closed to that vision of angels, but we see them and realise what Francia meant us to feel, all the promise of that horizon which was opening beyond, all the great future that was to grow out of the suffering and death which she mourned.