Who is the woman in the window? A housebound mother leaning out to gossip? A lover waiting for a letter? A sex worker summoning clients? An artist installing work in a gallery? As this tightly structured show reveals, the convention of showing women positioned at a window dates back millennia. The oldest artefact here – almost 3,000 years old – is an ivory carving from the Assyrian city of Nimrud, in which a woman gazes over a carved balustrade. She may have represented a cult goddess, or a sacred sex worker watching from a temple.
From its earliest representations, the window was presented as a space of display: a pictorial device framing an object of desire. A Greek krater (serving bowl for wine) is decorated with a scene from a comic play. Two grotesque old men complete with padded stomachs and flapping phalluses make an amorous call on a courtesan, whose head and shoulders appear framed in a window.
