Der Wohlgeruch

Spranger's 'Der Wohlgeruch' — meaning 'The Good Scent' or 'The Sense of Smell' — from 1578 in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, belongs to a series depicting the Five Senses, a popular allegorical subject in late sixteenth-century northern European painting. Each sense was personified through an appropriate figure and activity: smell through flowers, a nosegay, or incense; sight through a mirror; hearing through music; taste through food and drink; touch through a caress or painful contact. Spranger's 1578 treatment precedes his full development of the Rudolfine style, but the subject itself participates in the encyclopedic, systematizing impulse that would characterize his later court work. The Five Senses were popular both as devotional reminders of the body's relationship to worldly pleasure and as celebrations of the sensory richness of the natural world. The Bavarian collection's group of 1578 Spranger works suggests a single campaign of production, possibly for a single patron.

In oil on canvas, the personification of Smell is rendered as an elegant figure engaged with a flower or aromatic substance — the attribute that determines the allegory's identity. Spranger's 1578 palette uses warmer tones than his mature style, with the figure placed against a relatively neutral background that focuses attention on the sensory activity. The figure's refined features follow his Italian-influenced early style.