UC Riverside

This thesis will examine Quattrocento Italian Renaissance portraiture, specifically looking into the image type of double portraits. It assumes Fra Filippo Lippi’s A Man and a Woman at a Casement in the Metropolitan Museum, the first dual portrait, as its focal point. In this project, I seek to go beyond most scholarship on the subject by focusing on discussions of gender, costuming, and the bridal body and its embodiment of ideals and signs. The portrait itself is unique and enigmatic with an unusual asymmetry when it comes to its portrayal of gender: the man, seemingly peering in through a window towards the woman standing in the center, is considerably less prominent and smaller in scale than his female counter part. A closer examination of the vacuous gazes between sitters complicate things further, as they seem to narrowly miss one another despite their being in close proximity with one another. The lack of distinguishable features adds another level of ambiguity, as neither the man nor woman have any natural characteristics that point to any one individual. The painting’s atypical composition and depiction of gender makes it unique among other double portraits of the time, which typically portray couples in separate, yet equally proportioned profile images. When we re-examine Lippi’s 1440 portrait with these conventions in mind, we see an unusual set of representational choices. It is an examination into the how and why of these ambiguous choices that will form the basis of this thesis. I will be examining this portrait from a gendered perspective, wherein I argue that the female figure represents what the ideal Florentine elite woman should look like and her role in society. A close examination of the uncommon format, iconography, and mirroring between the male and female portraits raises an array of interesting questions about the social lives of Quattrocento couples, idealization vs. realism, early modern standards of representation—specifically how images such as Lippi’s use them, or depart from them—interior vs. exterior, and gendered spaces.