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.

Five hundred years – half a millennium – ago today, the pioneering landscape painter Joachim Patinir died in the city of Antwerp. A friend of Albrecht Dürer, and contemporary of Albrecht Altdorfer, like them he was one of the first serious landscape artists in Europe, and is thought to be the originator of the World View, a forerunner of the panorama.

Patinir was born in about 1480 in the town of Dinant or Bouvignes, not far from Brussels in modern Belgium. He may have been an apprentice to Gerard David in Bruges, and first registered as a Master in his own right in the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp by 1515. Between then and his death in Antwerp on 5 October 1524, he led a large workshop and appears to have been productive if not prolific. However, only five of his signed paintings have survived, with a total of as many as 29 being attributed to him or members of his workshop.

Most of his surviving paintings are at heart landscapes, incorporating a scene from a religious story in their foreground to satisfy the expectations of his patrons.

He is thought to have completed this Landscape with St John the Baptist Preaching in about 1510, when he was thirty, and had probably only recently registered as a Master with the Guild. Already, he is using repoussoir with the foreground tree at the left, and has exaggerated aerial perspective to make its horizon appear almost infinitely deep. This is the start of the World View.

Patinir may have enlisted the help of his friend Quentin Matsys when painting this triptych of The Penitence of Saint Jerome in about 1512. The left wing shows Christ being baptised by John, with the penitent Jerome in the centre panel, and the temptation of Anthony in the right wing. The landscape is continuous across the three panels, with exaggerated aerial perspective again, and the red clouds of dawn or dusk in the centre. Among the animals featured in the distance beyond Jerome is a fully laden camel.

The Baptism of Christ from 1510-20 is a fully developed version of the left wing in that triptych employing similar details, such as the Holy Ghost, in the form of a white dove, flying down from God the Father in the heavens above. In the left background, John is preaching in a recapitulation of his earlier Landscape with St John the Baptist Preaching above.

Patinir is known to have joined forces with Quentin Matsys (1466-1530) in their Temptation of St Anthony, either from about 1515 or 1520-24, where Matsys is believed to have been responsible for the figures in the foreground. Anthony is being taunted and tempted by a small devil behind him, a trio of beautiful women, and an ugly old hag to the left. Suitable cameos are embedded in the landscape, and there appears to be a war going on up in the dark clouds overhead,

The Rest on The Flight into Egypt from 1515-24 features Mary with the infant Jesus on her lap, and Joseph’s traditional walking stick, although he is missing from the family group. The landscape is Netherlandish, with a major port town in the right distance, and a windmill closer. It also incorporates one of Patinir’s distinctive landscape forms, the castle nestling inside a rock pinnacle in the upper centre. That reappears in several of his imagined landscapes.

His Landscape with the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah from about 1520 is perhaps more reminiscent of his near-contemporary Hieronymus Bosch. At the right edge, the Lot family are making their escape with the aid of angels, as the cities burn behind them. The cameo scene in a tent above them might show the temptation of Lot by his daughters.

His famous Crossing the River Styx (1520-4) is unusual for its mythological scene, including fire and damnation in Hell on the right. It’s perhaps his ultimate World View: the spectator is elevated above the surface and looks on and down over a richly-detailed landscape stretching to the far horizon.

There is some confusion, though. In classical mythology, the River Styx separates the earthly world from that of Hell. Here Patinir appears to show Charon the boatman navigating between Hell, on the right, and an Elysian vision, complete with angels, on the left. This may reflect an adjustment of myth to incorporate the Christian dichotomy of heaven and hell.

Although Patinir paints a crisp and clear horizon to the sea, he uses marked aerial perspective for the land on the left, making it recede into distant haze, to give the feeling of great depth of view, one of the key features both of the World View style and of panoramic landscapes more generally.

This wonderful World View of The Battle of Pavia has been attributed to Patinir, although there are strong reasons for disbelief, in that he is recorded to have died on 5 October 1524, but this battle didn’t take place until the morning of 24 February the following year. It does, though, follow Patinir’s lead with its World View.

Reference

Wikipedia