Very instructive are the wall-pictures of this period, painted not in fresco but on canvas by Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, for the decoration of the Scuole of S. Ursula and S. Croce.[274] Not only do these bring before us the life of Venice in its manifold reality, but they illustrate the tendency of the Venetian masters to express the actual world, rather than to formulate an ideal of the fancy or to search the secrets of the soul.  This realism, if the name can be applied to pictures so poetical as those of Carpaccio, is not, like the Florentine realism, hard and scientific.  A natural feeling for grace and a sense of romance inspire the artist, and breathe from every figure that he paints.  The type of beauty produced is charming by its negligence and naivete; it is not thought out with pains or toilsomely elaborated.[275]

Among the loveliest motives used in the altar-pieces of this period might be mentioned the boy-angels playing flutes and mandolines beneath Madonna on the steps of her throne.  There are usually three of them, seated, or sometimes standing.  They hold their instruments of music as though they had just ceased from singing, and were ready to recommence at the pleasure of their mistress.  Meanwhile there is a silence in the celestial company, through which the still voice of the praying heart is heard, a silence corresponding to the hushed mood of the worshipper.[276] The children are accustomed to the holy place; therefore their attitudes are both reverent and natural.  They are more earthly than Fra Angelico’s melodists, and yet they are not precisely of human lineage.  It is not, perhaps, too much to say that they strike the keynote of Venetian devotion, at once real and devoid of pietistic rapture.

Gian Bellini brought the art of this second period to completion.  In his sacred pictures the reverential spirit of early Italian painting is combined with a feeling for colour and a dexterity in its manipulation peculiar to Venice.  Bellini cannot be called a master of the full Renaissance.  He falls into the same class as Francia and Perugino, who adhered to quattrocento modes of thought and sentiment, while attaining at isolated points to the freedom of the Renaissance.  In him the colourists of the next age found an absolute teacher; no one has surpassed him in the difficult art of giving tone to pure tints in combination.  There is a picture of Bellini’s in S. Zaccaria at Venice—­Madonna enthroned with Saints—­where the skill of the colourist may be said to culminate in unsurpassable perfection.  The whole painting is bathed in a soft but luminous haze of gold; yet each figure has its individuality of treatment, the glowing fire of S. Peter contrasting with the pearly coolness of the drapery and flesh-tints of the Magdalen.  No brush-work is perceptible.  Surface and substance have been elaborated into one harmonious richness that defies analysis.  Between this picture, so strong in its smoothness, and any masterpiece of Velasquez, so rugged in its strength, what a wide abyss of inadequate half-achievement, of smooth feebleness and feeble ruggedness, exists!