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Balconies have been a significant device in painting, and in this and tomorrow’s articles I look at two groups of views using them with effect. This article looks from outside the balcony towards it, and the interior behind; tomorrow I’ll reverse that and look from balconies, typically from inside looking out at the world beyond.

These balconies are mostly platforms projecting from the upper part of a building, above ground level, normally capable of containing people, and constraining them from falling by a surrounding balustrade. They were popular features of some of the most ancient buildings in Europe, and much loved by classical civilisations.

For the visual artist they offer several opportunities, from their height above the ground affording good views or giving vertical extent, for the relationships between people on the balcony and those below, and most interestingly for their extension to the interior of a building into the exterior. Suspended in mid-air, they’re simultaneously both inside and outside, but neither.

Balconies play a significant role in several well-painted narratives, including that of David and Bathsheba, here in Jan Matsys’ painting of 1562. The action is taking place at ground level, where one of King David’s court has been sent down to express regal interest in the scantily-clad Bathsheba, to the wicked amusement of her maid. King David himself is leaning over the balustrade in the distance, elevated as his position demands, and looking down at us.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s much later Bathsheba from 1889 may have been painted three centuries later, but bears striking compositional similarities.

Another well-known story in which a balcony plays a key role is the love of Romeo and Juliet, as told in Shakespeare’s play, in which Act 3, scene 5 is known as the Balcony Scene. Richard Dadd’s version, in his watercolour Sketch for the Passions: Love from 1853, shows Romeo ascended and about to kiss Juliet, as a rather ugly nurse behind them looks away anxiously.

Ford Madox Brown’s interpretation from 1869-70 makes this even more vertiginous, with the couple alone and squeezed into a balcony smaller than a single bed. We ascend to the heights of love, and of ecstasy.

Balconies proved popular among those allied with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, such as Philip Hermogenes Calderon, who in his Home After Victory from 1867 uses one to lend a more courtly mediaeval air to this scene of rejoicing.

Balconies even appear in pioneer landscape painting. Possibly the smallest major painting of a balcony is that in Thomas Jones’s early plein air oil painting of A Wall in Naples, made on paper in about 1782. Not only is this painting tiny, little more than 10 x 15 cm (4 x 6 inches), but the balcony is so small that it’s really only good for hanging out the washing.

Another landmark painting of a balcony, Francisco Goya’s Majas on a Balcony, made between 1800-12, is unusual for ignoring almost all its compositional properties. These two young women are at much the same height as the viewer, and there’s no clear inside or out, just a couple of shady guys skulking behind them, and the black iron balustrade fencing them in. Majas were lower-class women in Spain, particularly its capital Madrid, who dressed in elaborate local style, here in florid mantillas, for example.

Goya apparently inspired Édouard Manet to paint The Balcony in 1868-69. Its four figures are Berthe Morisot (seated, left) who later became Manet’s sister-in-law, the painter Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet, Fanny Claus (standing, right, with umbrella) a violinist, and in the shadows behind Léon Leenhoff, Manet’s son. As with the painting that inspired it, this all but ignores the visual potential of the balcony.

Shortly after Manet had exhibited that to derision at the Salon, the young American Impressionist-to-be Mary Cassatt visited Spain, where she painted her more conventional take, The Flirtation – A Balcony in Seville (1872). Romeo and Juliet have been revisited, without a maja’s mantilla in sight.

It took the Valencian painter José Benlliure a trip to Italy to find his balcony, in The Carnival in Rome (1881), and exploit its potential more fully. Festooned with flowers and richly-decorated carpets, this balcony has become the carnival in miniature, its occupants dressed for the occasion. Even a pair of pigeons are joining in the revelry.

Balconies have also been places for more formal ceremonial, such as Papal and royal addresses. Jean-Jacques Scherrer uses this allusion for Charlotte Corday in Caen from 1894. It was Corday who assassinated the revolutionary Marat in his bath. Here Scherrer imagines her as heroine, greeting crowds of supporters beneath her balcony.

Around the end of the nineteenth century, the viewer became one of the riff-raff below the balcony of those richer and more famous. George Clairin’s undated Spanish Woman on Balcony looks down at us with disdain from lavish potted flowers.

In Clairin’s On the Balcony, from around 1910, we aren’t even close to those already halfway to heaven behind their ornate art nouveau balustrade.

Pierre Bonnard’s painting of the Blue Balcony from 1910 doesn’t reveal how important balconies became to him. But in each of two homes that he made with his lifelong partner (and later wife) Marthe, seen here on the balcony of the title, Bonnard had extensive balconies added.

Despite the hopes of the taxman, there really only are two certainties in life, that everyone alive was born, and we’ll every one of us die. This week, in this series examining how to read visual art, those two events are my themes, starting today with birth, the less frequently painted of the two.

There are several notable if not downright bizarre births among classical myths. The first are the twin deities Diana and Apollo born to the goddess Latona.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants probably from 1590-1620 shows the mother remonstrating with Lycians who are preventing her from slaking her thirst. Latona is here placing her curse on the locals, and behind them one appears to have already been transformed into a frog, the fate that befell them all.

The origin of the goddess Venus must have stretched the imagination of many ancients, as she is supposed to have emerged in full-size adult form from sea foam produced from the severed genitals of Uranus, leading to the popular visual account as Venus Anadyomene, Venus rising from the sea.

The first known painting of Venus Anadyomene is thought to have been made by the Greek artist Apelles, but was lost long before the modern era. In Botticelli’s Birth of Venus from about 1486, she stands in an over-sized clamshell, naked and beautiful, her long tresses blowing in the breeze while crucially ‘covering her modesty’.

Joseph Stella’s treatment of The Birth of Venus is completely novel and seems to have benefited from visits to an aquarium. She is shown at sea, her human figure perfect above the waterline, below that morphing into an aquatic plant, and finally merging into a helical shell rather than the traditional clam.

Of all the Classical deities, Bacchus (or Dionysus) must have the least credible origin. He was the result of another of Jupiter’s extramarital relations, this time with the mortal Semele. She seems to have been incredulous as to the true identity of her lover, and trapped him into having to reveal himself to her in his full divine majesty. Knowing that would inevitably kill her, he tried to dissuade her, which could only have fuelled her suspicions. Despite bringing only his weakest thunderbolts, the inevitable happened, and she was consumed by fire, but not before Jupiter could perform a Caesarian section on her and remove their unborn son Bacchus. The head of the Olympian deities then sewed his son’s foetus into his thigh to continue to term, when Bacchus was born a god.

Giulio Romano and his workshop’s Birth of Bacchus (c 1535) is a wonderful and revealing depiction of contemporary midwifery practice. Jupiter, at the upper right, seems to be fleeing the scene, thunderbolts in his right hand, and Juno, at the upper left, seems puzzled and upset. Down on earth, Semele has just been delivered of a baby boy, Bacchus, and her four attending midwives are caring for the baby, busy with the traditional towels and water as they do. However, above Semele’s abdomen and right thigh there are flames rising, and smoke. She looks up at Jupiter in distress if not horror. He isn’t stopping to take on any surrogate pregnancy, though, and Bacchus looks full-term too, hardly in need of further gestation.

While we’re stretching credibility, the story of Leda’s children is also extraordinary.

This interpreted copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan, probably painted in the early 1500s and now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, summarises Helen’s unique birth. The outcome of the union of Leda, wife of the king of Sparta, with Jupiter, in the form of a swan, Helen didn’t have a normal birth, but hatched from an egg laid by her human mother. Some accounts claim that Leda had intercourse with both the swan and her husband Tyndareus on the same night, and produced one or two eggs containing Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux, as shown here.

If you find that hard to believe, can I offer you Adonis, who was born from a myrrh tree? Myrrha’s incestuous relationship with her father led to her pregnancy and punishment by transformation into the myrrh tree, from which came forth Adonis.

Marcantonio Franceschini’s Birth of Adonis from around 1692-1709 adopts an appropriately vertical composition. Diana is handing Adonis over to another goddess, possibly Venus, who is preparing to take the role of wet-nurse, an obligatory task when your mother is a tree. Behind them are two women looking in amazement, and Pan and a satyr are providing appropriately celebratory music.

Having prepared you with adults born from sea foam and babies hatched from eggs, the Christian Nativity should now seem relatively mundane.

It’s probably Duccio’s Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel from 1308-11 that formed the prototype for centuries of subsequent paintings, with its humble shed set into rock, the Holy Family, and the attendant animals (ox, ass, sheep) and humans (shepherds, angels). This was installed at the high altar in the Duomo (cathedral) in Siena on 30 June 1311, and remained there for nearly two centuries, only being removed in 1506. Each panel has its own apposite Latin inscription.

Inevitably, when oil painting arrived in the Northern Renaissance, the Nativity was one of the first themes, here painted by Robert Campin some time between 1415-30. This is also an early example in which the scene has moved out from the cave that had become popular in southern Europe, to a shed more typical of local farms. The sparse background of earlier Nativities has been replaced with a landscape typical of the coast of northern Europe.

That immensely popular motif of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus has changed considerably over the years, through Raphael’s lifelike and intimate Madonnas, and again into the late nineteenth century with Virginie Demont-Breton’s contemporary reinterpretation in her undated Alma Mater. She looks very young, and there is no sign of Joseph, just her obviously holy infant lying swaddled on her lap. Around her are the weeds of waste and derelict sites.

The third painting in Louis Janmot’s epic series Poem of the Soul is curiously titled The Angel and the Mother without reference to its real subject, the baby. This is set by the Lake of Moras, where the mother sits with the newborn soul on her lap. Its guardian angel is kneeling in prayer for the mother and the soul of her new child. This combines the images of the annunciation to the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus.

Although many artists have painted their own infants and children, I know of only one showing the artist’s son immediately following birth.

The dates and background to Ford Madox Brown’s incomplete painting Take your Son, Sir! remain unclear. It’s thought that Brown started work on this in 1851, although it shows his second wife Emma with their newborn son. Their first son, Oliver, wasn’t born until 1855, and their second, Arthur, in September 1856, suggesting that he didn’t start this until at least 1855. It’s generally held that this shows not Oliver, who lived until 1874, but Arthur, who died aged ten months in July 1857, at which time Brown abandoned the painting.

It’s most interesting for the detail seen reflected in the mirror, showing a contemporary living room and a man, presumably a self-portrait. This is reminiscent of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding (1434). The artist’s wife appears to be pale and flushed, as if her labour wasn’t free of incident either.