Window

Window is a subject in art. The gallery holds 200 works in this subject in art, including works by Titian, Edgar Degas and Jean Honoré Fragonard.

Few motifs carry as much conceptual weight in Western art as the window, which serves at once as a source of light, a framing device, a threshold between interior and exterior worlds, and a metaphor for picture-making itself. That last association was codified by the Italian Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti, whose treatise *De pictura* (composed in Latin in 1435) instructed painters to treat the picture plane as an *aperta finestra*—an open window—through which the depicted scene is seen. The window thus became a foundational image for linear perspective and for the very idea of painting as a view onto the world. Earlier still, theologians had charged the window with sacred meaning: Mary was called *fenestra coeli*, the window of heaven, because light could pass through glass without breaking it, an analogy for the Virgin Birth. Early Netherlandish painters such as Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, and Hans Memling absorbed this symbolism, setting their Annunciations in contemporary domestic rooms whose windows admit the divine light—as in Memling's *Annunciation*, held in this collection.

In the Dutch Golden Age the window became both narrative device and structural backbone. Genre painters typically lit their interiors from a window at the left, using its measured daylight to model figures, organize space, and lend everyday scenes a contemplative stillness. The figure framed within a casement—often a woman, as in Murillo's *Two Women at a Window*—invited the viewer to ponder thresholds of privacy, desire, and the gaze. The motif persisted into later portraiture; Marie-Denise Villers's *Portrait of Charlotte du Val d'Ognes* uses a backlit studio window to silhouette and illuminate its sitter.

Romanticism turned the window inward, charging it with longing. Caspar David Friedrich is credited with inaugurating the modern open-window theme; his *Woman at a Window* (1822) shows a figure seen from behind gazing toward an unseen river beyond, the frame uniting nearness and distance and evoking *Sehnsucht*, a yearning for the infinite—a tradition surveyed in the Metropolitan Museum's 2011 exhibition *Rooms with a View*.

Modernism made the window a laboratory. Henri Matisse's Fauvist *Open Window, Collioure* (1905) dissolved the view into pure colour, while Pierre Bonnard's *The Open Window* (1921) flooded the interior with luminous reverie. René Magritte's *The Human Condition* (1933) made the Albertian conceit literal and uncanny, placing an easel before a window so that its painted landscape seamlessly replaces the real one—a meditation on perception that closes the circle back to Alberti's metaphor of the picture as a window onto the world.