In the earliest surviving double portrait in Italian painting, Fra Filippo Lippi depicts a woman and a man, in what appears to be a marriage portrait. From the Scolari family coat of arms held by the man, the two have been identified as Lorenzo di Ranieri Scolari and Angiola di Bernardo Sapiti, who married in the 1430s. With its strong characterisation, interest in space and texture, as well as an intriguing, unique compositional choice, Lippi creates a mode of portraiture where the woman dominates and where she assumes a commanding presence right at the heart of the panel. Lippi's portrait offers not only a window into marriage, but also illustrates fifteenth century Italy in fascinating detail: his female figure wears a houppelande, a French-inspired garment fashionable at the time, whilst choosing to extenuate her neck and abdomen, the former for beauty, the latter perhaps to signal fertility. From this, it has been suggested that this double portrait may have been creat...
The pulling apart and pushing together of bodies comes to define Rodin's Fugit Amor, and much of his oeuvre from the late nineteenth century. Cast here in bronze, a man and a woman cling onto one another, precariously balanced on a slab of rock, which their undulating bodies seem to grow out from. At once weighted but also weightless, Rodin's small sculpture is infused with Classical references, and becomes a conversion of opposites, symbolising the desperation and ultimate futility of love affairs. The title translates to 'futile love', already implying a barrier to togetherness or the wasted energy on the attempt which Rodin depicts here. Glistening in bronze, the two bodies become even more anguished and elongated, in a combination of peaks and troughs: the woman lifts her head and torso upwards, hand raking through her hair, whilst the man slides off the rockface, his legs dangling precariously into the abyss. However, they still seem to deliberately fit tog...