Marriage Italian Style: Love’s Double Portrait

The Florentine artist Fra Filippo Lippi explored marriage traditions in Renaissance Italy’s first composed double portrait.

A detail of "Portrait of a Woman With a Man at a Casement," circa 1440, by Fra Filippo Lippi. Public Domain

Fra Filippo Lippi’s “Portrait of a Woman With a Man at a Casement” is a landmark of Italian Renaissance painting and European art as a whole. It represents a series of firsts in Italian portraiture: It is the first Italian double portrait, is the first to portray a sitter in a domestic interior, and is the first in the genre to show a landscape in the background.

This artwork, thought to commemorate a marriage, can be interpreted as a metaphor for romantic love and the origin of portraiture itself.

The Innovative Florentine

Lippi (1406–1469) was one of the greatest Florentine artists of the Renaissance. However, his art, which includes elaborate fresco cycles, secular portraiture, and religious scenes, is not as well-known as that of his contemporaries.