The Florentine school of painting, to which Ghirlandajo belonged, was not so famous for colour as the Venetian school, but it had many other elements to commend it. One cannot expect Ghirlandajo to rank with Titian, Rubens, or other "colourists" of his own and later periods, but he did the very best work of his day and school. He attained to fame through his choice of types of faces for his models, and by his excellent grouping of figures. Until his day, the faces introduced into paintings were likely to be unattractive, but he chose pleasing ones, and he painted the folds of garments beautifully. He was not entirely original in his ideas, but he carried out those which others had thus far failed to make interesting. Often, in his wish to paint exactly what he saw, he softened nothing and therefore his figures were repulsive, but Fra Bartolommeo's pupil gave promise of what Michael Angelo was to fulfill. Ghirlandajo and Michael Angelo were a good deal alike in their emotional natures. Both sought great spaces in which to paint, and both chose to paint great frescoes. Indeed Ghirlandajo had the extraordinary ambition to put frescoes on all the fortification walls about Florence. It certainly would have made the city a great picture gallery to have had its walls forever hung with the pictures of one master. Had he painted them, inside and out, when such an enemy as Napoleon came along, with his love of art, and his fashion of taking all that he saw to Paris, he would likely enough have camped outside the walls while he decided what part of the gallery he would transfer to the Louvre. One of the reasons that Ghirlandajo is famous is that he often chose well known personages for his models, and as he painted just what he saw, did not idealise his subject, he gave to the world amazing portraits, as well as fine paintings. The same thing was done by painters of a far different school, at another period. The Dutch and Flemish painters were in the habit of using their neighbours as models. Ghirlandajo is classed among religious painters, but let us compare some of his "religious" paintings with those of Raphael or Murillo, and see the result. He painted seven frescos on the walls of the Santa Maria Novella in Florence, all scenes of Biblical history, as Ghirlandajo imagined them. They show him to have been a fine artist, but to have had not much idea of history, and to have had little sense of fitness. Ghirlandajo's seven subjects are taken from legends of the Virgin, and the greatest represents Mary's visit to Elizabeth; it is called "The Visitation," and it is a fresco about eighteen feet long painted on the choir wall.