Calvary with Saint Job Lying at the Foot of the Cross

In the 1490s a new disease spread through Italy. People called it the French disease, the sickness now known as syphilis, and it covered its victims in sores. In Bologna the hospital that came to treat them was San Giobbe, named after Job, the man in the Old Testament whom God allowed to be struck with boils from head to foot. Francia painted this altarpiece, around 1513, for the high altar of the hospital's church, and the biographer of artists Giorgio Vasari saw it there.

That is why Job lies at the foot of the cross, in the place where painters often put Mary Magdalene. He is half naked on a red cloak, wears a crown, and points to a scroll wound round the cross. Its Latin says, He himself bore greater things. For the patients below, the meaning was that Christ had suffered more than Job, and more than them. The crown, the Louvre suggests, comes from an old tradition that identified Job with Jobab, a king of Edom.

The panel stayed in Bologna until the early 19th century and was bought by the Louvre in London in 1864. In 1950 its paint was transferred from the wood onto canvas, and later laid down on a panel again.