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Fra Filippo Lippi, 'Portrait of a Woman with a Man in a Casement', 1440

 


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 created to celebrate the birth of a child. The sitter also has a high forehead and her hair is swept back, again to signal her marital status, in contrast to the unmarried woman who would probably have her hair loose. The various jewels on her draperies and countless rings on her fingers signal her wealth, as do the thick materials she wears, which Lippi successfully recreates in tempera, a notoriously difficult medium to blend. Finally on her sleeve, Lippi includes the embroidered lettering of lealta, meaning 'faithful', which once again could allude to the commemorating of a wedding. The detail stretches back beyond the figures towards a landscape which seems to depict a calm, domestic environment, with rows of houses adding to the early attempt at perspective by the artist. 

If this is a portrait which commemorates a marriage, or indeed the birth of a child, it is also fundamentally a portrait of a woman, not a man. The sitter is the bride, and her partner is very much a secondary, passive figure who is barely acknowledged in the picture plane. Lippi chooses to show off the female figure in full profile, her elegant, statuesque frame filling the box that she is now contained within. Although she fills the panel, she remains perfectly placed at its centre; she is completely ignorant of the viewer and completely fixed on the face before her. Perhaps it is the thinness of her lips, pressed tightly together, coupled with the arched eyebrows and clasped hands, that suggest a sense of displeasure and even irritation at her confinement. However, her tall figure and unwavering gaze also gives off an air of dominance and satisfaction at the marriage she has secured for herself. It is an ambiguous gaze, at once suspicious yet commanding, displaying the skill which Lippi has in creating a character. It is also one that contrasts deeply to the slither of a face that the viewer gets for the woman's husband, peering in with great uncertainty. The box-like setup allows the female figure to be viewed from both sides, by us and by her husband, and despite there being suggestions of entrapment in marriage through Lippi's composition, as the freedom of the landscape spills out into the background, there is no sense of fear or disillusionment by the woman at her position, but if anything, defiance. 

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