From his earliest beginnings, which rather suggest illuminated miniatures on a large scale, we see him grow step by step, acquire knowledge of perspective, of design, of colour harmonies, of the effect of light and atmosphere, of movement. We find him initiating advance in many directions. The circular composition, which was scarcely known before his days, is carried by him to such perfection, that it becomes the favourite device of most later Florentine painters. He is the first Florentine who shows a real appreciation of the beauty of Nature, who allows real daylight to enter into his pictures, and who studies reflections. The Florentine School was never a school of _painters_ in the strict sense of the word, like the Venetian School. Its work was always based on linear design, upon which colour was superadded--an afterthought, as it were. The Florentine did not think in terms of colour. But Fra Filippo, without abandoning the essentially Florentine insistence on linear design, came nearer the true pictorial conception than any of his contemporaries or successors. In his first "Nativity" at the Florentine Academy he gives not the slightest hint of the astounding development his art was to undergo before he left Florence for Prato. The colour is purely localised, like the flat tones of the Gothic miniaturists in whose school he had been trained. The Madonna looks as if she were cut out and pasted on to the landscape. What a step from its hard delineation to the _morbidezza_, and the cool shimmering tones and all-pervading sense of atmosphere in his "Coronation of the Virgin," which, in this respect, remains a unique achievement in Florentine art. Both his Florentine "Nativities" are as awkward and clumsy in design as could be. Lopped-off figures of praying monks are squeezed into the extreme corners; the landscape background is seen in steep perspective, almost as in a bird's-eye view, and has no relation to the figures in the foreground; the perspective and the whole arrangement of the ruined building in the one are childish. And a few years later he had arrived at the noble architectonic design of the "Virgin Enthroned," at the Louvre, in which, notwithstanding here and there a reminiscence of Gothic awkwardness, the figure of the angel on the left foreshadows the easy grace of similarly poised figures in Andrea del Sarto's art.