Pontignano, 4-11 september 2004
"Finestre - Windows - Fenêtres"
The most ancient depictions of windows bear witness to their importance in
human imagination. Sites for the epiphany of divinities, sometimes they frame
a Pharaoh, sometimes a Woman in the alluring guise of a fertility goddess,
whose divine aura, however, will give place to a narrower erotic appeal in
biblical and Greek culture. Later, in patristic writings and with the rise
of Western literature and art, the window recovers its sacred connotations.
It becomes the Fenestra Coeli, an opening onto Heaven and the Holy Light,
and hence an essential feature in any Annunciation: the ray of light that
streams through its glass and illuminates the Virgin Mary represents the
immaculate conception. But the window-because it mediates between two different
worlds and can thereby symbolize the five senses-is also an opening through
which the Devil can enter human existence. It can thus easily become an image
of death. From the Middle Ages onward, its association with sensuality and
with the dialectic of light and shade, good and evil, fascinated writers
and artists. For centuries, in literature and the visual arts, women gazed
down from casements (or from behind shutters) on ardent young suitors, exchanged
confidences with them, helped them (sometimes with their plaits) to scale
the wall. For centuries lovers reproached the 'unruly sun' for bursting in
at their windows at dawn and ending their night of passion.
With the emergence of secularization in the Renaissance, the window became
a thoroughfare of light that enabled painters and architects to conjure up
a vivid material world of shapes and colours with which to adorn the daily
life of human beings. In the nineteenth century the window took on a new
significance in art and literature. For women it became, together with the
door, an important part of domestic space-a symbol of waiting or of desire,
including the desire to escape. Men tended to prefer upper windows from which
they could dominate the space below (typically the property of which they
were the owners) or so as to keep aloof from the hurly-burly of city-life
in order to meditate or write. The window thus became a vantage point for
observation-whether natural, scientific, social, or psychological. As such
it became emblematic of the modern writer's concern with the technical and
ethical problem of choosing a 'point of view' from which to observe the world,
or, conversely, of the writer's commitment to the activity of 'spying' on
what goes on in interiors -forms of surveillance that clearly also have a
political dimension.
The thirst for instant knowledge that goes with modernity has led to the
invention of an array of mechanical windows-the camera, cinema, television-in
our attempt to control reality in an ever-accelerating world. The windows
of trains, cars and aircraft from which we can watch the landscape racing
past us have made the experience of speed itself accessible to narration.
And now, of course, the windows within windows of the computer have become
our most powerful new tool for exploring the complexity of reality.
The deadline for the applications
has been extended to the 23rd of May
Executive Committee
Roberto Bigazzi, Laura Caretti, Remo Ceserani, William N. Dodd, Pierluigi
Pellini, Simona Micali, Orsetta Innocenti,
Letizia Bellocchio, Simone Brunetti, Marta Marchetti, Anna Masecchia, Florian
Mussgnug, Michela Scolari
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Professors and tutors
