The Senses

About

Sight has dominated Western art, but artists have long tried to picture, and later to engage, all five senses. Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens painted The Five Senses (1617–18) as a series of crowded rooms, each full of objects for one sense: instruments for hearing, flowers for smell, a feast for taste. The young Rembrandt made small allegories of the senses in Leiden in the 1620s.

In the 20th century art began to address the senses directly. The Brazilian artist Lygia Clark made Sensorial Masks (1967) fitted with smells, sounds and eyepieces that alter perception. Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet (2001) places 40 speakers in an oval, each playing a single voice from Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium (c. 1570). Sissel Tolaas researches and recreates smells, including the scents of whole cities, and the English painter Sargy Mann kept painting after losing his sight.