FRANCIA, a celebrated Bolognese painter was born towards 1450, and died 6th January 1517. His real name was Francesco Raibolini, his father being Marco di Giacomo Raibolini, a carpenter; he was apprenticed to a goldsmith named Francia, and from him probably he got the nickname whereby he is generally known; he, moreover, studied design under Marco Zoppo. The youth was thus originally a goldsmith, and also an engraver of dies and niellos, and in these arts he became extremely eminent. He was particularly famed for his dies for medals; he rose to be mint-master at Bologna, and retained that office till the end of his life. A famous medal of Pope Julius II. as liberator of Bologna is ascribed to his hand, but not with certainty. At a mature age—having first, it appears, become acquainted with Mantegna—he turned his attention to painting. His earliest known picture is dated 1494 (not 1490, as ordinarily stated). It shows so much mastery that one is compelled to believe that Raibolini must .before then have practised painCing for some few years. This work is now in the Bologna gallery,—the Virgin enthroned, with Augustine and five other saints. It is an oil picture, and was originally painted for the church of S. Maria della Misericordia, at the desire of the Bentivoglio family, the rulers of Bologna. The same patrons employed him upon frescos in their own palace; one of Judith and Holophernes is especially noted, its style recalling that of Mantegna. Francia probably studied likewise the works of Perugino; and he became a friend and ardent admirer of Raphael, to whom he addressed an enthusiastic sonnet. Raphael cordially responded to the Bolognese master’s admiration, and said, in a letter dated in 1508, that few painters or none had produced Madonnas more ...beautiful, more devout, or better portrayed than those of Francia. If we may trust Vasari—but it is difficult to suppose that he was entirely correct—the exceeding value which Francia set on Raphael’s art brought him to his grave. Raphael had consigned to Francia his famous picture of St Cecilia, destined for the church of S. Giovanni in Monte, Bologna; and Francia, on inspecting it, took so much to heart his own inferiority, at the advanced age of about sixty-six, to the youthful Umbrian, that he sickened and shortly expired. Distanced though he may have been by Raphael, Francia is rightly regarded as the greatest painter of the earlier Bolognese school, and hardly to be surpassed as representing the art termed “antico-moderno,” or of the “quattrocento.” It has been well observed that his style is a medium between that of Porugino and that of Giovanni Bellini; he has somewhat more of spontaneous naturalism than the former, and of abstract dignity in feature and form than the latter. The magnificent portrait in the Louvre of a young man in black, of brooding thoughtfulness and saddened profundity of mood, would alone suffice to place Francia among the very great masters, if it could with confidence be attributed to his hand, but in all probability its real author was Franciabigio; it had erewhile passed under the name of Raphael, of Giorgione, or of Sebastian del Piombo. The London National Gallery contains two remarkably fine specimens of Francia, once combined together as principal picture and lunette,—the Virgin and Child and St Anne enthroned, surrounded by saints, and (in the lunette) the Pietà, or lamentation of angels over the dead Saviour. They come from the Buonvisi chapel in the church of S. Frediano, Lucca. Other leading works are—in Munich, the Virgin sinking on her knees in adoration of the Divine Infant, who is lying in a garden within a rose trellis; in the Borghese Gallery, Rome, a Peter Martyr; in Bologna, the frescos in the church of St Cecilia, illustrating the life of the saint, all of them from the design of Raibolini, but not all executed by himself; a public passage now traverses these frescos, and they are in a pitiful state of decay. His landscape backgrounds are of uncommon excellence. Francia had more than 200 scholars. Marcantonio Raimondi the famous engraver is now the most renowned of them; next to him, the painter Lorenzo Costa; also Amico Aspertini, and Francia’s own son Giacomo, and his cousin Julio.
FRANCIA, José Gaspar Rodriguez, commonly called Dr Francia, dictator of Paraguay, one of the most remarkable men connected with the history of South America. The date of his birth is not definitely ascertained, but probably falls about 1757. According to one account, he was of French descent; but the truth seems to be that his father, Garcia Rodriguez França, was a native of S. Paulo in Brazil, and came to Paraguay to take charge of a plantation of black tobacco for the Government. He studied theology at the college of Cordova de Tucuman, and is said to have been for some time a professor in that faculty; but he afterwards turned his attention to the Jaw, and practised in Asuncion. Having attained a high reputation at once for ability and integrity, he was naturally selected for various important offices, and exercised great personal influence. The Robertsons, whose accounts have done so much to blacken his memory, relate how, when he was requested by one of his friends to undertake an unjust cause in his behalf, he not only refused, but went and offered his services to the man who was likely to be wronged, and by his boldness and energy secured his case. On the declaration of Paraguayan independence in 1811, he was appointed secretary to the national junta, and exercised an influence on affairs greatly out of proportion to his nominal position. When the congress or junta of 1813 changed the constitution and established a duumvirate, Dr Francia and the Gaucho general Fulgencio were elected to the office. A story is told in connexion with their installation, which recalls the self-coronation of William I. of England and Napoleon the great. In theatrical imitation of Roman custom, two curule chairs had been placed in the assembly, one of them bearing the name of Caesar and the other that of Pompey. Francia seated himself in the Caesar chair, and left his colleague to play the part of Pompey as best he might. In 1814 he secured his own election as dictator for three years, and at the end of that period he obtained the dictatorship for life. He was no mere nominal sovereign; but for the next twenty-five years he might have boasted, with even more truth than Louis XIV., “L’état e’est moi.” In the accounts which have been published of his administration we find a strange mixture of capacity and caprice, of far-sighted wisdom and reckless infatuation, strenuous endeavours after a high ideal and flagrant violations of the simplest principles of justice. He put a stop to the foreign commerce of the country, but carefully fostered its internal industries; was disposed to be hospitable to strangers from other lands, and kept them prisoners for years; lived a life of republican simplicity, and punished with Dionysian severity the slightest want of respect. As time went on he appears to have grown more arbitrary and despotic, more determined to maintain his mastery over the country, and more apprehensive lest he should lose it. And yet at the time of his death it is said that he was generally regretted, and his bitterest opponents cannot deny that if he did much evil he also did much good. Deeply imbued with the principles of the French Revolution, he was a stern antagonist of the church. He abolished the Inquisition, suppressed the college of theology, did away with the tithes, and inflicted endless indignities on the priests. “What are they good for!” was his saying; “they make us believe more in the devil than in God.” He discouraged marriage both by precept and example, and left behind him several illegitimate children. For the extravagances of his later years the plea of insanity has been put forward; and it was evident that his worst characteristics were at their worst when the east wind blew. The circumstances of his death were in strange keeping with his life. He was about to sabre his doctor when he was seized with a fit, and he expired the same day, September 20, 1840. He was buried in the cathedral of Asuncion, but the spot is no longer known, and a story is told by Mr Mansfield and by Lieutenant-Colonel Thomson, to the effect that his body was dug up by some private enemies and flung into the river. On the other hand, it is well known that the greatest respect was shown to his memory by those who succeeded him in the government of Paraguay. Unfortunately for the history of his administration, Francia kept no records; and he caused all his orders to be returned to him with the word “executed” on the margin, and then to be destroyed.
The first and fullest account of Dr Francia was given to the world by two Swiss surgeons, Rengger and Longchamps', whom lie had detained from 1819 to 1825— Essai historique sur la révolution de Paraguay et la gouvernement dictatorial du docteur Francia, Paris, 1827. Their work was almost immediately translated into English under the title of The Reign of Doctor Joseph G. R. De Francia in Paraguay, 1827. About eleven years after there appeared at London Letters on Paraguay, by J. P. and W. P. Robertson, two young Scotchmen whose hopes of commercial success hail been rudely destroyed by the dictator’s interference. The account which they gave of his character and government was naturally of the most unfavourable description, and they rehearsed and emphasized their accusations in Francia's Reign of Terror, 1839, and Letters on South America, 3 vols., 1843. From the very pages of his detractors Thomas Carlyle succeeded in extracting materials for a brilliant defence of the dictator “as aman or sovereign of iron energy and industry, of great and severe labour.” It appeared in the Foreign Quarterly Review for 1843, and is reprinted in vol. iv. of the author’s Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Comparatively little new light has since been thrown on the subject Captain Richard F. Burton gives a graphic sketch of Francia’s life and a favourable notice of his character in his Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay, 1870, while C. A. Washburn takes up a hostile position in his History of Paraguay, 1871.
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