Taste

Taste, the final of the five senses in Gonzales Coques's series for the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, was typically depicted through figures eating, drinking, or surrounded by food and wine. Among the senses Taste occupied a morally ambiguous position: essential to human sustenance, it was also the sense most closely associated with gluttony and sensual excess. Seventeenth-century painters navigated this tension by showing Taste exercised with refinement — wine appreciated rather than gulped, food tasted rather than devoured. For Coques's Antwerp patrons, this distinction mattered: they were prosperous people who enjoyed the pleasures of the table but wished to be seen as governing those pleasures with the same discipline they applied to their commercial affairs. The 1650 canvas belongs to the most coherent phase of Coques's Five Senses production, and its presence alongside Sight, Hearing, Touch, and Smell in the Antwerp museum allows the complete series to be studied as originally conceived.

Canvas with still-life passages depicting food, fruit, wine vessels, or table settings that invite comparison with the dedicated still-life tradition flourishing simultaneously in Antwerp. Coques balances these props against the figure, ensuring neither overwhelms the other. Warm, inviting light enhances the sensory appeal of the depicted foods. The figure's posture and expression mediate between appetite and refinement, calibrating the moral register of the allegory.