Feeling

Feeling, the third of the Five Senses series at the Augustiner Museum in Freiburg alongside Taste and Smell, explores the tactile sense through objects and activities that engage touch. Frans Francken the Younger's treatment of the sense on copper around 1700 participates in the fully developed Baroque allegorical tradition that had made the Five Senses a staple of Flemish and Dutch cabinet painting. Feeling was among the most morally ambiguous of the senses in early modern thought: while touch was necessary for practical life and for certain forms of learning, it was also associated with the pleasures of the flesh and with the dangers of sensory excess. Painters typically navigated this ambiguity by depicting both the legitimate and the transgressive aspects of tactile experience — artisanal skill, medical examination, and affectionate contact alongside the overtones of physical pleasure.

Representing the sense of feeling required objects and activities that foregrounded texture: fabrics, metals, water, fire, and the human body in contact with these materials. Francken's copper surface, paradoxically smooth where the depicted surfaces were rough, created a technical challenge and a visual irony that attentive collectors would have appreciated. The fine brushwork needed to differentiate the textures of velvet, fur, metal, and skin on a non-absorbent surface represents the highest demand of cabinet painting technique.