Portrait of a Woman with a Man at Casement by Fra Filippo Lippi in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 2010

Artist: Fra Filippo Lippi (Italian, Florence ca. 1406–1469 Spoleto)

Title: Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement

Date: ca. 1440

Medium: Tempera on wood

Dimensions: 25 1/4 x 16 1/2 in. (64.1 x 41.9 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Marquand Collection, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889

Accession Number: 89.15.19


Catalogue Entry:

This is one of the defining works of Italian portraiture: the earliest surviving double portrait, the first to place the female sitter in a notional interior, and the first to include a landscape background. Each of these novelties was to be taken up and developed by artists only later in the century. Lippi has left us a number of altarpieces that include donor portraits, and these allow us confidently to date this work to about 1440–44, contemporary with the Annunciation in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome. That altarpiece also provides close analogies for the landscape seen through a window. Although there is the possibility that the picture was commissioned to celebrate the birth of a child, the sumptuous clothes and many rings worn by the woman are appropriate for a bride, as is the motto lealtà (loyalty) embroidered in gold threads and seed pearls on her ermine-lined sleeve. The male is no less expensively garbed in scarlet and wears a hat designating his high social rank. On the basis of the coat of arms displayed by the male sitter, Breck [see Ref. 1913] tentatively identified the couple as the Florentine Lorenzo di Ranieri Scolari (a relation of the celebrated general Pippo Spano) and Angiola di Bernardo Sapiti, who are usually said to have been married in 1436 [see Pompeo Litta, Familie celebri di italia, Milan, 1819–83, fasc. LXVII (1850), disp. 122, tav. I and IV]; however, according to Katalin Prajda [correspondence in departmental archive file], they were still unmarried in 1439. Although the dark pigment of the coat of arms is a deteriorated blue rather than the expected black, Prajda notes that the Scolari employed a number of variations. She is currently pursuing the possibility that the Scolari coat of arms here may have been intended to identify the female rather than the male sitter.

In this innovative portrait, Lippi retains the conventional profile view of both sitters but includes their hands. As with most later portraits, he situates the female in a domestic interior, the box-like shape and steeply foreshortened ceiling of which are plainly adopted from depictions of the Madonna and Child (Donatello's so-called Pazzi Madonna in the Bodemuseum, Berlin, and Scheggia's Madonna and Child with Two Angels in the Museo Horne, Florence). By contrast, the male stands outside the room, gazing through a lateral window opening, while a second window offers a view onto a landscape that, it has been suggested, may record property belonging to the family.

The degree to which Lippi has generalized the features of the sitters is as notable as the implausibility of the "room" that encases the woman. One need only compare their features with the portraits he includes in the roughly contemporary Coronation of the Virgin (Uffizi, Florence) to see the extent to which detailed physiognomic description has been suppressed. The difference in intent comes to the fore if Lippi's portrait is compared to Petrus Christus's 1446 portrait of Edward Grimston (collection of Lord Verulam, on loan to the National Gallery, London), in which the highly individualized sitter is placed in a far more plausible room, with careful attention to the light falling through the panes of a circular leaded-glass window. This comparison is important, since there has been a persistent attempt to link Lippi's innovations to his awareness of Netherlandish practice.

Lippi's two figures occupy different planes in space, with the female figure dominant and the male in a subordinate position—as an observer. Examination with infrared reflectography demonstrates that the artist carefully rethought the placement of the woman's hands, one over the other, to achieve an effect of de