THEME

The conception of a painting as an open window, formulated by Leon Battista Alberti in 1435, shaped entire generations of painters. For artists such as Robert Delaunay, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp, the “idea of the window” was a starting point for reformulating their understanding of painting or fundamentally redefining what a painting is. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the window, reduced to the rectangle of its frame, was used as a symbol of an attempt to free painting from its representational function. With Fresh Widow, a replica of a French window, Marcel Duchamp proposed a farewell to illusionistic painting in 1920. Both Duchamp and many artists of classical modernism revisited the centuries-old pictorial metaphors of “fenestre aperte” (Leon Battista Alberti) and “pariete di vetro” (Leonardo da Vinci), linking the idea of the window to that of the painting, but only to question, through an ironic reversal, the classical conception of painting as a reflection of the world and replace it with a new definition of art.

Windows are openings that admit warmth, light or scents into a space and allow us to look out, in and through. They seem to represent one of the fundamental anthropological constants. The English word “window” was first recorded in the early thirteenth century and originally meant an opening in a roof. Yet the word and the object derive from Latin and have a relatively short history: one of cultural borrowing from Mediterranean ways of living. The “window” was not originally conceived as an opening through which light would enter a building. Mycenaean palaces had no windows: light entered their rooms from above. Early Roman houses likewise show that windows could be dispensed with: an open atrium admitted light into the building and illuminated its rooms without window openings. Windows appeared much later, with the emergence of multi-storey buildings.

From this, we can infer that windows in antiquity evidently had an entirely different function, unrelated to illuminating rooms. Ancient temples were originally plank-built huts with a single opening through which augurs (Roman priests)—diviners, interpreters of the world and priests in one person—performed their rituals, made observations and foretold fate. The significance of the opening lay in narrowing the field of observation to a fragment and thereby focusing the gaze. Such a frame both restricted perspective and brought it into being.

As a medium of optical communication, windows separate the exterior from the interior, while also establishing a passage between these separate worlds through which the gaze crosses the boundary between outside and inside.

Windows admit light and make seeing possible. “The Northern mystics of the fourteenth century maintained that people should look into their own interior with spiritual eyes, while the metaphor of the window–mirror links soul and body. Among other things, the Renaissance preserved the ancient conception of the eye as the window of the soul: l'occhio che si dice finestra dell'anima, as Leonardo writes.” (Jure Mikuž, Zrcaljena podoba, p. 81) The image of the window was thus associated with the act of seeing from an early period.

Since the fifteenth century, the window has been a metaphor for painting. In On Painting (De pictura), published in 1435 as a guide introducing painters to the principles of pictorial construction, Leon Battista Alberti describes how he begins work on a painting: “First, on the surface I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I wish and imagine it as an open window through which I look at what is represented there.” With this “rectangle”, Alberti defines the frame and, at the same time, the fragment of reality to be recorded. He then imagines this frame as an empty place in a wall into which he inserts a painting organised according to the rules of central perspective.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the window ceases to be a metaphor for a view of the world as defined by Alberti and becomes an independent painterly motif or object. Artists no longer use the window as a means of creating an illusion of space or in the sense of mimesis, but place it at the centre of artistic inquiry as an open field of interpretation. The window becomes a conceptual space through which artists explore the nature of the image, the mechanisms of perception, sociological and cultural aspects, and the complexity of the gaze. The image directs our gaze, while the gaze, in turn, helps shape the image and its meanings. The gaze thus transcends the boundaries of the visible, becoming a space of experience, interpretation and critical reflection.