Meanwhile the Carmelite's art had made prodigious progress. Filippo Lippi, the pupil of the last Giottesque, was now swimming abreast of the mighty current of the Renaissance. If his early Madonnas recall something of the spirituality and naïve faith of Fra Angelico, the altarpieces of his later Florentine period, and, above all, the superb "Coronation of the Virgin," painted for Sant' Ambrogio, and now in the Florence Academy, are inspired by the beauty of this visible world. The atmosphere is of this earth, and not of the celestial regions. His types are no longer ethereal, but realistically robust. In the "Coronation of the Virgin" he has left us a portrait of himself at the age of about forty, in the figure of the kneeling monk on the left, towards whom an angel raises a scroll with the lettering IS PERFECIT OPUS. The features are rather coarse and heavy, but scarcely express that low sensuality which his biographers have tried to read into them. The expression of his eyes in particular is intelligent, frank, and good-natured. III The Sant' Ambrogio altarpiece must have added enormously to the reputation which the Carmelite painter enjoyed among his contemporaries. It was only natural that he should have been chosen by the _proposto_ Gemignano Inghirami and by the magistrates of Prato to undertake the fresco decoration in the choir of the cathedral of that city, when Fra Angelico, in spite of repeated urging, refused to accept this important commission, his time being fully occupied by the completion of the series of frescoes at the Vatican. In the spring of 1452, Fra Filippo, accompanied by his assistant, Fra Diamante, took up his abode at Prato, and entered upon the most eventful and artistically the most significant period of his career. As we have seen, he still kept up his workshop in Florence, where his temporary presence is repeatedly testified by documentary evidence during the next few years. Thus, although he began to work in the choir chapel immediately after his arrival at Prato, as may be seen from the entry in the _Libra delle spese_ in the _Archivio del Patrimonio ecclesiastico_ in Prato, recording under date of May 29, 1452, the payment of fifty lire to "Fra Diamante di Feo da Terranuova, gharzone di Fra Filippo di Tommaso," his frequent absence and general dilatoriness were the cause of so much delay that the decoration of the chapel was not completed before 1468, a year before the master's death.