The symbolism of windows

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Windows in Art

By Christopher Masters

Taking as its theme an apparently simple and everyday object – the window – this book demonstrates how many meanings it can have within a work of art. So we see windows as status symbols, as spiritual metaphors, as mirrors reflecting people and their emotions, as barriers, and as liberating views to wider worlds.

The publishers state that the book is ‘a remarkable exploration of an important but hitherto neglected subject in art history’, rather exaggerating the neglect of the topic. In fact windows have become a rather popular art historical theme in recent years. Take, for example, Sabine Rewald’s wonderful  Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press,  2011), which examines the theme of the open window as a motif in German, Danish, French, and Russian art, with Romantic intimations of unfulfilled longing and contemplative moods. Or Shirley Neilsen Blum’s study of one artist’s use of windows, in her Henri Matisse: Rooms with a View: The Interiors of Henri Matisse (Thames & Hudson, 2010).

Even so, Windows in Art gives us a much more varied selection, both in period and theme. A series of 90 images of window subjects raise our awareness of the many ways in which artists can use them, and the various meanings they can carry. They range from the 15th to the 21st centuries, including examples by Mantegna, Titian, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Matisse, Dali, Hockney and Banksy. 

The book is organized into thematic rather than chronological chapters, within which there is a deliberate juxtaposing of centuries. So ‘Status and Style’ starts with David Hockney and goes on to discuss Jan van Eyck, while Vermeer’s paintings feature in various places – which works if the reader is truly reading, though it gets a little confusing for someone just leafing through, which this book rather invites you to do. Nonetheless, some of the pairings across the page can be very interesting: one double-page spread shows the pale sculpted stone figure of a woman (c. 1443-51) looking down from a French palace into a street, paired with a gallery sculpture by George Segal (1974) of a woman painted white and made of plaster, glass and wood, looking out of a real window.  

Many of the images show the exterior world, viewed from an interior through a window. For example, we see the back of a woman in Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman at the Window (1822), and as we look over her shoulder into the view beyond we share her experience, though she remains unknown to us. John Christian Dahl’s View of Pillnitz Castle (1823) gives us a similar open window without the human presence, beckoning us to come and look for ourselves.

Windows without the human presence tend to impart an atmosphere of tranquility or disquiet, and a sense of mystery. They loomed particularly large in the work of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916), an artist little known in the UK before the exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy, London in 2008. His Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams (1900) graces the cover of this publication. It is a quirky composition, conveying a peaceful silence, a painting so bare and spare in composition that the artist omitted the window handles and curtains.

Stained glass windows are included in this selection, with images from Sante-Chapelle and Chartres – a taster of another, major subject in itself, and rather out of place in a publication otherwise devoted to the work of named, individual artists creating compositions in other media. But apart from this, the publication gives us an interesting selection of images both familiar and less well known, and good food for imaginative thought.  This delightful book is for the general reader and the academic alike.

Windows in Art by Christopher Masters is published by Merrell 2011. 192pp., 100 colour illus. ISBN: 978-1-8589-4554-5