Touch

Touch, from Gonzales Coques's Five Senses series, was typically personified through a figure engaged in an act of physical contact or sensation — clasping hands, handling a thorned rose, or engaging in some gesture that foregrounded the body's capacity for feeling. The allegory of Touch invited painters to explore the boundary between pleasure and pain: the same sense that allowed appreciation of velvet and skin also registered injury, and moralists read the senses as double-edged gifts that could lead toward virtue or vice depending on their exercise. Coques's small panels for the series, now distributed across Belgian collections including the Vlaamse Kunstcollectie, together demonstrate how a single theme could be articulated across scale and media. His patrons in Antwerp's merchant community would have encountered such works as a set or as individual cabinet pieces, meditating on the sensory world they navigated daily. The 1650 dating places this work in the most productive period of Coques's career.

Canvas support here, distinguishing this panel from the wood-based works in the series and suggesting it may have been planned as a slightly larger or differently framed component. The figure's hands and the object of touch are the focal elements, treated with heightened attention to tactile surface — skin, fabric, or whatever material the sense is exercised upon. Coques's paint surface is uniformly smooth, the finish of glazed layers denying the viewer the haptic pleasure the subject depicts.