A room with a view: Poetics of a windowpane in painting by Pierre Bonnard

Traditionally, a painting is seen as a window into the world. How one perceives the world is at the same time their world view, and in painting, the latter is typically depicted using art tools. The author emphasizes the frequency of the motif of windowpane in Pierre Bonnard's painting, presenting it as the painter's poetic tool. The motif of a window is analyzed in three aspects: formal, teleological and ontological. The formal aspect refers to the context of artistic facts. The window is a format, and the format in painting has formative properties and forms a morphogenetic field. The teleological aspect refers to the windowpane as a means by which the purpose of uniting external and internal space is achieved in a painted scene. Such purposefulness reduces the various underlying components of the exterior and interior to a common form denominator through artistic matching (shape, tone, color, texture, etc.). Finally, the ontological aspect is linked to Bonnard's definition of his own work as "pantheistic painting". From the mentioned purposefulness arises the same identical nature of what is depicted. Everything shown in the painting belongs to the same ontological order; everything is given equal attention; everything mirrors, coincides and overlaps with each other. In a word, formative, iconographic and worldview aspects are united by the corresponding purposefulness of this motif.