The Sense of Sight

The Sense of Sight, painted in 1617 and part of the Prado's Five Senses series, is often considered the most intellectually dense panel in the entire cycle. The allegorical interior is packed with objects that either require sight to appreciate or represent human attempts to extend and understand vision: paintings within the painting, maps, globes, astronomical instruments, mirrors, lenses, and a remarkable range of artworks. The room depicted is recognisably modelled on the cabinets of curiosities — Wunderkammern — favoured by Brueghel's Habsburg patrons, who collected objects from art, science, and nature as a demonstration of encyclopaedic knowledge and universal dominion. Several paintings visible in the interior can be identified as real works from the Archduke's collection, making this canvas an extraordinary document of Habsburg collecting at the moment of the Spanish Netherlands' cultural apogee. Rubens contributed the allegorical figure of a woman gazing at a painting, while Brueghel filled the surrounding space with hundreds of recognisable objects.

Oil on panel, the extraordinary complexity of Sight's interior demands Brueghel's finest micro-scale brushwork across an exceptionally wide compositional field. Paintings-within-the-painting are rendered at dramatically reduced scale but with recognisable compositions, requiring Brueghel to essentially paint dozens of miniature copies of real works. Reflective surfaces — mirrors, glass vessels — demonstrate his mastery of complex light effects.