In most of his pictures this familiar quality is marked. His saints are not types, but people of the Florentine middle class. An early Madonna in the Uffizi, Figure 103, shows the Virgin as a slight girl with her ash-blond locks elaborately dressed and braided for a holiday. She is almost overborne by her sturdy Son, an exacting brute, one may imagine, while the attendant angel is a grinning street Arab caught in the intervals of mischief. Such pictures with their winsomeness and actuality worked powerfully to break down both the old Gothic decorum and the new sublimity of Masaccio. To grasp the novelty of Fra Filippo’s most famous panel picture, The Coronation of the Virgin, painted for the nuns of St. Ambrogio in 1441, Figure 104, and now in the Uffizi, one has only to recall the devoutly formal and simple version of the subject which Fra Angelico painted about the same time for the convent of San Marco. The composition of Fra Filippo, on the contrary, is radiantly informal. We breathe the air of the commencement at a very nice girls’ school, with adoring friends and proud relatives moving at the edges of the ceremony. Indeed God the Father has merely the air of a benevolent trustee or visiting minor celebrity awarding a prize to the best girl. It is all like the crowning of a _Rosière_ in a French village. Robert Browning in one of the most admirable poems in “Men and Women” makes Fra Filippo promise “I shall paint God in the midst, Madonna and her Babe. Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood, Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet As puff on puff of grated orris-root When ladies crowd to church at Midsummer.” Our picture is evidence enough that the time has come to Florentine art when youth shall be served. Monastic vows, and in fact duties of any sort, bore lightly on Fra Filippo. He tasted the forbidden sweets of life recklessly, and worked only when the rare mood urged. He was in and out of the good graces of the Medici. Called to Prato to fresco the choir of the Collegiata, in 1455, he was nine years achieving what a steady workman would have done in two. But in the meantime Fra Filippo had run away with the nun, Lucrezia Buti, shuffled off his monastic vows (through the indulgence of the humanist Pope, Pius II), married and settled down as the father of a family. His random joyous course was nearly run, and his last frescoes at Prato show a kind of discipline that is foreign to his earlier work. In 1464 he completed the Feast of Herod and the Funeral of St. Stephen, frescoes which forecast the sort of narrative painting that was to mark the close of the century.