Sight

Sight, from Gonzales Coques's Five Senses series housed in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, was the sense most directly connected to painting itself — a self-referential gesture that artists rarely missed. The allegory of Sight was typically rendered through figures studying paintings, looking through telescopes or lenses, or gazing at their own reflections in a mirror. For a painter like Coques, whose small canvases were made precisely to be looked at by discerning collectors, Sight carried an especially resonant meaning: the act of attentive looking that his patrons performed was the sense being celebrated. The 1650 dating places this within his mature period, when his handling was at its most assured. In the context of seventeenth-century Antwerp, Sight also carried religious and philosophical connotations: vision was the sense most associated with truth, reason, and the apprehension of God's creation — the highest of the five.

Canvas support with carefully balanced interior lighting designed to show objects associated with vision at their most legible — mirrors, lenses, paintings-within-paintings, or astronomical instruments. Coques applies thin glazes to create the luminous reflective surfaces that Sight demanded as its emblems. Figure and attribute are compositionally balanced so neither overwhelms; the viewer's own act of looking is implicitly included in the subject.