Allegory of Sight and Smell

Allegory of Sight and Smell, painted in 1620 and now in the Museo del Prado, is the most celebrated of the Five Senses panels and one of the most technically accomplished still-life compositions in the history of Flemish painting. Where the individual sense panels each focus on one allegorical faculty, this panel — combining Sight and Smell — creates a double allegory of extraordinary richness. The interior is packed with visual objects (paintings, optical instruments, maps) for Sight, while the foreground is laden with flowers and scent-producing materials for Smell. Rubens contributed the allegorical figures of two women engaging with these sensory realms, while Brueghel's contribution — the encyclopaedic still-life accumulation — is widely regarded as his masterpiece in the genre. The panel's fame was immediate and lasting; it influenced still-life painting across northern Europe throughout the seventeenth century.

Oil on panel, the double allegory requires Brueghel to integrate two distinct still-life vocabularies — art objects and instruments for Sight, flowers and natural fragrant materials for Smell — within a single coherent spatial interior. The flower arrangement in the foreground is among his most complex, combining dozens of species with botanical accuracy while forming a compositionally satisfying unified mass.