there.  Angelico’s angels are unearthly, not so much in form as in sentiment; and superhuman, not in power but in purity.  In other hands, any imitation of his soft ethereal grace would become feeble and insipid.  With their long robes falling round their feet, and drooping many-coloured wings, they seem not to fly or to walk, but to float along, “smooth sliding without step.”  Blessed blessed creatures! love us, only love us! for we dare not task your soft serene beatitude, by asking you to help us!

There is more sympathy with humanity in Francia’s angels:  they look as if they could weep as well as love and sing.

* * * * *

Correggio’s angels are grand and lovely, but they are like children enlarged and sublimated, not like spirits taking the form of children; where they smile it is truly—­as Annibal Caracci expresses it—­con una naturalezza et simplicita che innamora e sforza a ridere con loro:  but the smile in many of Correggio’s angel heads has something sublime and spiritual, as well as simple and natural.

And Titian’s angels impress me in a similar manner—­I mean those in the glorious “Assumption” at Venice—­with their childish forms and features, but an expression caught from beholding the face of “our Father that is in heaven:”  it is glorified in fancy.  I remember standing before this picture, contemplating those lovely spirits, one after another, until a thrill came over me like that which I felt when Mendelssohn played the organ—­I became music while I listened.  The face of one of those angels is to the face of a child just what that of the Virgin in the same picture is compared with the fairest of the daughters of earth:  it is not here superiority of beauty, but mind, and music, and love kneaded, as it were, into form and colour.

But Raphael, excelling in all things, is here excellent above all; his angels combine in a higher degree than any other, the various faculties and attributes in which the fancy loves to clothe these pure, immortal, beatified creatures.  The angels of Giotti, of Benozzo, of Fiesole, are, if not female, feminine; those of Filippo Lippi and of Andrea, masculine; but you cannot say of those of Raphael, that they are masculine or feminine.  The idea of sex is wholly lost in the blending of power, intelligence, and grace.  In his early pictures, grace is the predominant characteristic, as in the dancing and singing angels in his “Coronation of the Virgin.”  In his later pictures the sentiment in his ministering angels is more spiritual, more dignified.  As a perfect example of grand and poetical feeling, I may cite the angels as “Regents of the Planets,” in the Capella Chigiana.  The cupola represents in a circle the creation of the solar system, according to the theological and astronomical (or rather astrological) notions which then prevailed—­a hundred years before “the starry Galileo and his woes.”  In the centre is the Creator; around, in eight compartments, we have,