Smell

Smell, one of the Five Senses series alongside Taste and Feeling in the Augustiner Museum in Freiburg, depicts the olfactory sense through flowers, perfumes, incense, and the human response to pleasant or unpleasant odors. Frans Francken the Younger's Five Senses series on copper, dated around 1700, represents the fully developed Baroque allegorical genre that had been building through the entire seventeenth century. Smell was among the most symbolically complex senses: it was associated with both spiritual experience (incense rising to heaven, the odor of sanctity attributed to saints' bodies) and with earthly vanity (the transient pleasure of flowers, the deceptive sweetness of perfumes). The Augustiner Museum, one of the oldest civic museums in Germany, preserves the complete series as a coherent statement of Baroque allegorical ambition.

Representing smell through paint required the painter to show objects associated with olfactory experience — flowers, herbs, perfume bottles, incense burners — and figures in the act of smelling them. The sense could not be directly rendered in the visual medium but had to be inferred through the depicted response: a figure inhaling a rose, a person recoiling from an unpleasant odor, or a cook bending over fragrant preparations. Francken's copper surface allowed the detailed rendering of specific flower species and perfume vessel types.