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Painting: A Window to make a Place
Taro Igarashi ( Professor, Tohoku University / Architectural Historian and Critic )

Windows and paintings share an ontological function. Both bring forth a world within a demarcated zone. A window is a physical hole in a wall, rendering reality of outside visible. A painting, by contrast, creates space virtually, within a frame. Murals have been found at Pompeii depicting landscapes as if seen through open windows, and equally interestingly, 17th-century Dutch paintings were sometimes curtained, like windows, and their trompe-l'œil formats were in the …