Allegory of the five senses

Theodoor Rombouts's Allegory of the Five Senses (1632), at the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, participates in one of the most popular allegorical genres of the Flemish seventeenth century. Five Senses cycles — sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch — were common in both series of individual paintings and combined allegories where all five senses appear as figures within a single composition. They appealed to collectors for their combination of philosophical depth (derived from Aristotelian and later neo-Platonic discussions of sense perception) and sheer decorative and sensory richness: paintings, music, flowers, food, and textured fabrics could all be depicted. For Caravaggesque painters like Rombouts, the Five Senses offered an opportunity to display technical virtuosity across different material textures and figure types. A combined allegory requires either five separate genre-adjacent scenes unified within one canvas or five personified figures in a single spatial setting, each carrying attributes associated with their respective sense. The Ghent museum's holding of this work alongside the 1627 Gedele allegory demonstrates the range of Rombouts's allegorical output.

A combined Five Senses allegory within a single canvas requires the painter to distribute visual interest across multiple figure groupings or attributes without creating compositional clutter. Rombouts organises the scene through his characteristic warm single-source lighting, which creates focal points across the composition rather than distributing light evenly. The material props — mirrors, musical instruments, flowers, food, fabrics — function as still-life elements embedded within the figure composition.