| In this study I examine how writers and artists portray the balcony in European literature and painting. I focus on works from the Renaissance through the end of the nineteenth century in the French, Italian, English, Spanish and Portuguese traditions, and I briefly glance back to one Medieval legend as a point of comparison. The balcony as a locus for vision and observation is the primary scope of my dissertation; its secondary aim is to examine various declensions of the balcony's status as a threshold space. These questions grow out of a broader preoccupation with defining limits—spatial, conceptual, social, semantic and functional. The introduction questions why the balcony has been a persistently evocative subject for artists throughout the ages. Chapter 1 presents a brief history of the balcony, from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Roman mœnianum to René Magritte's twentieth century parody of Edouard Manet's Le balcon. Chapters 2 and 3 look at the "classical" balcony, meaning those literary precedents that nineteenth century representations of balconies in some way respond to, reject or reproduce. Chapter 2 focuses on the Medieval and Renaissance Italianate balconies of a Provençal vida set in Italy, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; Chapter 3 examines Molière's L'Ecole des Femmes and Mariana Alcoforado's Les Lettres Portugaises . The discussions in both chapters focus on how the limits between inside and outside, and between authority and subversion, are challenged and reinforced by interactions at the balustrade. Chapters 4 and 5 look at the poetry of Charles Baudelaire: first "Le Balcon," then his prose poem "Le Mauvais Vitrier." I conclude with balconies in Spanish and French painting from 1812 to 1880. First I revisit the standard pairing between Francisco Goya's 1812 Majas en el balcón and Manet's balcony, then I gloss over a watercolor by Constantin Guys, and I end with Berthe Morisot's and Gustave Caillebotte's depictions of bourgeois lifestyle and architecture as the turn of the century approaches. |
