D i s t a n z a. Descrizione di uno sguardo, tra visione e scrittura

The present essay provides a philosophical evidential interpretation of Gustave Caillebotte’s painting Intérieur, Femme à la Fenêtre (1800), which portrays a moment in the daily life of a bourgeois couple. The cryptographic interpretation proposed in this essay aims at investigating the hidden meanings of the painting. First of all, what is the woman really looking at? We can only imagine the sign ‘RESTAURANT ARBUTUS’ (an extremely sour fruit, the metaphor for an erotic forbidden fruit) written on the facade of the building across the street. This demonstrates the impossibility of an all-encompassing view in the form of an exact reading of reality. But this also suggests the relevance of the distance (between subject and object, husband and wife, the woman and the arbutus) in both of the realms of knowledge and love.