Again and again Fra Filippo acts as initiator and sets the fashion for whole generations of artists. He is one of the first to experiment with devices for producing the illusion of depth, either by the interpolation, between the foreground and the background figures, of architectural elements, as in the Louvre "Madonna"--the idea had already served Donatello in the sister-art of sculpture--or by the skilful disposition and lighting of the subsidiary figures in the background, as in the episodes from the life of St. Anne, which form the setting to the adorable "Madonna and Child" of the Pitti _tondo_. If Michelangelo's nude athletes in the background of his "Holy Family" _tondo_ are based upon the similar figures in Luca Signorelli's circular "Madonna and Child" at the Uffizi, Signorelli himself clearly derived from Filippo Lippi the use of the background figures, one of whom turns his back to the spectator just like the women on the extreme right of Lippi's _tondo_, for the purpose of enhancing the sense of depth and space. This woman with the boy clinging to the folds of her dress, as well as the one by whom she is preceded--a rapidly moving figure, with clinging diaphanous garments and with a basket poised on her head--will be found again and again during the next half-century of Florentine art, just as the Uffizi "Madonna adoring the Divine Child," who is supported by two boy-angels, became the prototype of a long succession of similar pictures. In the dancing "Salome" of the Prato frescoes, again, we have the forerunner of the type of figure and movement that received its highest development in the art of Botticelli, Filippo Lippi's greatest pupil.