This feeling becomes
embodied, above all, in the very various army of charming angels;
and more particularly, perhaps, because Venice had no other means of
expression than painting, in the singing and playing angels of the
old Venetians. These angels, whether they be the girlish, long-haired
creatures, robed in orange and green, of Carpaccio; or the naked babies,
with dimpled little legs and arms, and filetted silky curls of Gian
Bellini, seem to concentrate into music all the many things which that
strong pious Venice, tongue-tied by dialect, had no other way of saying;
and we feel to this day that it sounds in our hearts and attunes them to
worship or love or gentle contemplation. The sound of those lutes and
pipes, of those childish voices, heard and felt by the other holy persons
in those pictures--Roman knight Sebastian, Cardinal Jerome, wandering
palmer Roch, and all the various lovely princesses with towers and palm
boughs in their hands--moreover brings them together, unites them in one
solemn blissfulness round the enthroned Madonna. These are not people
come together by accident to part again accidentally; they are eternal,
part of a vision disclosed to the pious spectator, a crowning of the
Mass with its wax-lights and songs.

But the Venetian playing and singing angels are there for something more
important still. Those excellent old painters understood quite well that
in the midst of all this official, doge-like ceremony, it was hard, very
hard lines for the poor little Christ Child, having to stand or lie for
ever, for ever among those grown-up saints, on the knees of that majestic
throning Madonna; since the oligarchy, until very late, allowed no little
playfellow to approach the Christ Child, bringing lambs and birds and
such-like, and leading Him off to pick flowers as in the pictures of those
democratic Tuscans and Umbrians. None of that silly familiarity, said
stately Venetian piety. But the painters were kinder. They incarnated
their sympathy in the baby music-making angels, and bade them be friendly
to the Christ Child. They are so; and nowhere does it strike one so much
as in that fine picture, formerly called Bellini, but more probably Alvise
Vivarini, at the Redentore, where the Virgin, in her lacquer-scarlet
mantle, has ceased to be human altogether, and become a lovely female
Buddha in contemplation, absolutely indifferent to the poor little
sleeping Christ. The little angels have been sorry. C