Hearing

Hearing, from a series depicting the five senses, shows Michaelina Wautier working in the allegorical genre that was popular in Flemish painting. The five senses series was a standard subject allowing artists to combine figure painting with symbolic objects representing each sense — in this case, musical instruments or other sound-producing devices appropriate to the allegory. Wautier's five senses series is among the most ambitious programmatic undertakings by any woman artist of the seventeenth century. Working in Brussels, she produced large-scale allegorical paintings that rival her male contemporaries in technical accomplishment and compositional ambition, challenging the assumption that women artists were confined to smaller, more domestic subjects. The identification and attribution of Wautier's work has been a major art-historical achievement of recent decades, recovering a painter who was known to her contemporaries but had been largely forgotten until scholarly reassessment established her place in the canon of Flemish Baroque painting alongside the better-known names of her era.

The figure and symbolic attributes are rendered with rich color and solid modeling, the composition balancing allegorical meaning with naturalistic observation.