Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste and Touch

After stories rooted in the Bible and Greek mythology, here is something more earthly: the Five Senses. Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste and Touch were popular subjects for painters and engravers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Series were eagerly bought by wealthy merchants and an intellectual middle class, as something attractive to hang on the wall, and to spark conversation among friends.

We will look at three series here: the comic panels of Jan Miense Molenaer, the sensual engravings of Hendrick Goltzius, and the earliest known paintings of Rembrandt. Pretty images, that reward a second look. Because at second glance, things get interesting. The senses delight, and the senses deceive. Let’s spot any moral message beneath the grinning peasants and the elegant lovers.

Jan Miense Molenaer and the Five Senses

Jan Miense Molenaer simply made his Five Senses funny. These small panels, each the size of an A4 and now in the Mauritshuis, show the senses as red-faced peasants drinking, groping, singing out of tune, and changing a baby’s nappy.

Sight comes first, a man and woman peering into an earthenware jug by lamplight, the eternal search for one more drop. But the well-dressed collector examining this painting is also, at that very moment, using his eyes.

Then Hearing follows: three jolly figures, singing and beating on a beer barrel. But music, drink, and good company were pleasures the buyer of this type of painting knew perfectly well. Jan Miense Molenaer’s peasants are a mirror: crude and exaggerated, but uncomfortably recognisable. The owner of this painting will pretend to be so much better than these drunk low-class singers. But is he?

Smell is unforgettable: a small boy’s dirty bottom, held up by a woman wiping him clean, while the man beside her turns away in disgust, clutching his beer mug at a safe distance. 

Taste shows a peasant leaning back to take a long pull from his tankard, a dagger at his belt hinting that the evening may not end well.

And Touch, the most banal sense of all and the last in the series, shows a peasant groping under a woman’s skirts — only to receive her slipper squarely on the head. This last panel has a small secret. An X-ray of the canvas revealed that Molenaer originally painted the scene more explicitly — the man’s arm almost entirely visible beneath the skirts, a bare knee exposed. He later painted over it, adding a blue petticoat to tone things down. Even in peasant satire, it seemed, there were limits.

A final detail worth mentioning: a series of Molenaer’s Five Senses is recorded in the auction catalogue of the collection of a Leiden professor and collector, Franciscus de le Boë Sylvius, at his death in 1673. The auction catalogue described the series as hanging in his dining room. It is a tempting image: the learned professor, having dinner with his intellectual friends and colleagues, and making fun of those grinning peasants. Low-class behaviour, they claim, that they themselves would never indulge in. But are those five senses not universal? For professors and peasants alike!

Hendrick Goltzius and the Five Senses

Forty years before Jan Miense Molenaer painted his peasants, the Haarlem master Hendrick Goltzius made a very different kind of five senses. Where Miense Molenaer went for laughs, Goltzius went for desire. His series of five engravings shows the senses as pairs of young lovers — elegantly dressed, intimately close, exchanging glances that leave little to the imagination. The images are sensual, sophisticated, and deliberately seductive.

But look more carefully, and each print carries a warning. Beneath every image runs a Latin pair of verses composed by Cornelius Schonaeus, the rector of the Haarlem Latin school. And in each one, Schonaeus delivers the same message: pleasure conceals a trap. The senses delight, and the senses deceive. Each engraving also contains an animal, placed within the scene — not decorative, but emblematic. Together, image, animal and verse make up a complete moral argument, elegant and layered.

Of all animals, the cat is perfectly chosen for the sense of Sight. A sharp-eyed hunter that waits in silence, and then strikes. It watches the lovers with the same calculating attention they turn on each other, directly or via the mirror. The moral message: the sense of sight leads, through its own excess, to a kind of blindness. As Schonaeus puts it:

Dum male lascivi nimium cohibentur ocelli,
In vitium praeceps stulta inventa ruit.

When lustful, hunting eyes are not restrained,
a foolish youth may blindly rush into ruin.

A deer stands in the engraving of Hearing — an animal whose large, open ears make it the natural emblem of the sense. Alert to every sound, it cannot choose not to listen, and that very sensitivity is what makes it vulnerable. A hunter’s call will startle the deer into the open — and that is where it is caught. Schonaeus draws the parallel:

Ne patulas blandis praebe Syrenibus aures,
Quae dulci cantus saepe lepore nocent.

Do not lend your ears to voices that flatter and tease!
Their sweet and charming song often causes harm. 

The Sirens (Syrenibus in the verse) of classical mythology are behind this moral message; those irresistible voices that drew sailors onto the rocks.

The dog in the image of Smell is no accident. In the emblem tradition the dog was celebrated above all other animals for the acuity of its nose — but also for its indiscriminate enthusiasm, sniffing at everything without judgment. Schonaeus’ verse makes the point:

Quamvis floriferus sit gratus naribus hortus,
Sepe tamen dulci fel sub odore latet.

Although a flower-filled garden is pleasing to the nose,
bitterness is often hidden beneath the sweet fragrance.

What smells sweet may conceal something bitter. The dog follows its nose without hesitation. So, perhaps, do the young lovers.

A monkey sits in the scene of Taste — and in Renaissance iconography the monkey was a well-established symbol of appetite, imitation and folly. It mimics human behaviour without understanding it, reaching for pleasure without restraint. Schonaeus is equally direct: appetite, of all kinds, has consequences.

Dulcia sepe nocent avido gustata palato,
Votaque damnosae luxuriosa gulae.

Sweets and treats bring harm to a greedy mouth!
And a lustful throat will only end in ruin.

The tortoise in the engraving of Touch is the most loaded of the five animals. It carries its house on its back and never leaves it, it symbolises the ideal of remaining within the domestic sphere. In Goltzius’ engraving, where a young couple embrace in an image that barely conceals its erotic charge, the tortoise delivers the pointed message: seek your pleasures at home, within the bounds of marriage, and not outside the door.

Quae conspecta nocent, manibus contingere noli,
Ne mox peiori corripiare malo.

What's already dangerous to look at, do not touch with your hands!
What follows may hurt you far more.

Rembrandt van Rijn and the Four Senses; where is the Fifth?

Around 1624, a teenager in Leiden picked up his brush and painted five small panels on the theme of the five senses. Rembrandt was about eighteen years old. These are his earliest known works. But only four survived; can we find the fifth?

Where Goltzius gave the senses to elegant, half-naked lovers, and Miense Molenaer handed them to grinning peasants, Rembrandt’s scenes are comic, but with a touch of human feeling.

Sight, in the Lakenhal Museum in Leiden, shows a spectacles seller on a market, demonstrating his wares to an elderly couple. The old man points at his nose, the old woman peers hopefully through her new pair of glasses. The woman bears a resemblance to Rembrandt’s mother, whom he used as a model throughout his Leiden years. In the old man with the heavy nose and ragged beard, we may recognise his father — Harmen Gerritsz van Rijn, a Leiden miller, whose face we know from a drawing his son made around 1630.

In Hearing, two elderly singers share a large open music book, a young man peering over their shoulders from behind. There is something touching about this painting. Two old souls, still singing together at their age.

Smell shows a young man who has fainted in his chair in anticipation of a barber-surgeon drawing blood. A worried old woman holds a handkerchief of smelling salts under his nose; the patient has passed out before the knife even touches him. Rembrandt mocks all three: the overconcerned nurse, the dubious surgeon, and the young man’s spectacular lack of courage. The plague was raging through Leiden in 1624, the year these panels were painted — and bloodletting was considered one of its treatments.

Touch takes us into an equally dubious operating room. A barber-surgeon is removing a ‘stone’ from his patient’s head. A popular motif, in which quacks purported to cure stupidity by surgery. The phrase ‘to have a stone removed from one’s head’ was common vernacular for being made a fool of — and that’s what Rembrandt was painting.

But where is Taste? The whereabouts of that panel are still unknown. These Rembrandt paintings are small, just 22 by 18 cm. Taste might be hanging somewhere hidden in a corner, or in a museum depot, or stored in the attic of your grandparents’ house. Now that we know what Rembrandt’s senses look like, we should all be on the lookout for Taste; use your eyes and ears for spotting this missing one. If you have a feeling where it can be, speak out and curators will listen. It makes sense to use all our senses to find the missing piece.

The Five Senses and the Ages of Man

As a way to close: one painting that contains all five senses at once. Theodoor Rombouts, a Flemish contemporary of Miense Molenaer, painted this large canvas (almost 2 by 3 meters) gathering five figures, each one embodying a different sense through gesture and attribute.

An old man at the far left holds a pair of spectacles to his eye and rests his other hand on a mirror — Sight. Beside him, a guitarist surrounded by a jumble of instruments at his feet — Hearing. A drinker with a wine glass and a bare chest, one foot resting on a copper basin for cooling wine, bread and melon spread before him — the image of a young Bacchus, standing for Taste. To the right, a smoker holds a pipe in one hand and a bunch of garlic in the other — Smell. And in the middle of the group, a blind man runs both hands lovingly over white marble statues — Touch, the one sense that has not abandoned him.

What makes the Rombouts quietly remarkable is its underlying structure. The five figures follow the arc of a human life. Taste and Smell are given to the young, their senses at full intensity, pleasure still uncomplicated by consequence. Hearing and Sight belong to two middle-aged men, grateful for what remains. And Touch is left to the old blind man at the centre, for whom most of life’s pleasures have faded. But who still reaches out, happy to feel the world with his hands.

That’s it! Thanks for looking at the pictures and for listening to my words.