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Acentury ago Joseph Breck, then an assistant curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, proposed that the two sitters depicted in the Museum’s landmark portrait by Filippo Lippi could be identified as the Florentineborn Agnola di Bernardo Sapiti and her husband, Lorenzo di Rinieri Scolari (Figure 3). Breck’s identification was based on his reading of the coat of arms under the male sitter’s hands as that of the Scolari family.1 Remarkably, aside from Dieter Jansen’s counterproposal in 1987 that the coat of arms is that of the Ferrero family of Piedmont, the premise of Breck’s hypothesis has never been put to the test.2 The present article aims to do just that, reading details of the picture in light of emerging archival information about the Scolari family. There is no record of the picture prior to about 1829, when it was purchased in Florence by the Reverend John Sanford as the work of Masaccio (1401 – 1428). Breck was the first to ascribe it to Filippo Lippi, and this attribution is universally accepted today. Scholars generally agree that the work was painted between about 1435 and the early 1440s.3 The coat of arms in the portrait consists of a gold field with three diagonal blue bands (or, three bends azure). The blue has darkened considerably, which is why Breck (and Jansen) erroneously described the color as black.4 According to the Raccolta Ceramelli Papiani in the Archivio di Stato, Florence, the bands of the Scolari arms were altered to black (or, three bends sable) from time to time during the Middle Ages; the earliest variation of the coat of arms corresponds to what is found in Lippi’s painting.5 The most famous of the Scolari, Filippo (Pippo) di Stefano Scolari, known as lo Spano (1368/69 – 1426), who was raised to baronial rank by Sigismund of Luxemburg (r. 1387 – 1437) in the Kingdom of Hungary, employed or, four bends sable (Figure 1).6 Extant monochrome examples of the family’s coat of arms from the first half of the fifteenth century show both three and four bands. The coat of arms appearing on the facade of the Scolari Palace in the Borgo degli Albizi, Florence, for instance, which was inhabited by lo Spano’s youngest brother, Matteo di Stefano Scolari (1370/71 – 1426), dates to about the 1410s or 1420s and shows a shield with three bands surmounted by a dragon and a helmet (Figure 2).7 The other two surviving coats of arms — both with four bands — are connected to Pippo Scolari’s second cousin Andrea di Filippo Scolari (d. 1426), who served King Sigismund in Hungary as the bishop of Várad (present-day Oradea, Romania).8 One appears on the bishop’s tomb in Oradea (Figure 4), while the other is displayed on the facade of the parish church of Santa Maria, founded by Andrea Scolari in Vicchiomaggio (Figure 5).9 On the basis of a number of factors — the placement of the coat of arms under the male sitter’s hands, the portrait’s probable date, and the Scolari genealogy as provided by Luigi Passerini (1816 – 1877) — Joseph Breck tentatively identified the couple as Lorenzo di Rinieri Scolari and his wife, Agnola di Bernardo Sapiti.10 He cautioned that “the identification cannot be considered complete,” because “[d]uring the years within which the portrait must have been painted there were possibly in Florence besides Lorenzo several brothers and nephews, the facts of whose lives are too little known to allow us to discard them.”11 Today, one hundred years after Breck published his article, what is known about these other Scolari relations? Lorenzo di Rinieri Scolari (1398/1410 – ?) — who, according to Passerini, married in 1436 — was one of the three brothers who became the heirs of Pippo, Matteo, and Andrea Scolari in 1426. Between 1427 and 1429 he lived in Treviso, in the territory of the Republic of Venice, and was not in Florence at the time of the tax declarations (catasti) of 1431, 1433, and 1442, probably commuting between the Republic of Venice, the Kingdom of Hungary, and the The Coat of Arms in Fra Filippo Lippi’s Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement