Touch

Touch, painted in 1618 and now in the Museo del Prado, is one panel in Jan Brueghel the Elder's famous Five Senses series created in collaboration with Peter Paul Rubens. The series — Sight, Hearing, Touch, Smell, and Taste — was commissioned by Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella, the Habsburg governors of the Spanish Netherlands, and represents one of the most elaborate allegory cycles of the entire Baroque period. Brueghel was responsible for the lavishly detailed interior settings and object accumulations, while Rubens contributed the allegorical figures in several panels; Touch features Rubens's sensual figure of a woman experiencing tactile sensation surrounded by Brueghel's extraordinary array of objects associated with the sense of touch — weapons, armour, fabrics, musical instruments, and animals. The division of labour between the two painters — Rubens for figures, Brueghel for still-life and landscape — was a formal collaboration that both artists acknowledged, and the Prado series is among the definitive examples of such joint production in Baroque painting.

Oil on panel, the painting achieves its celebrated effect through the contrast between Rubens's broadly painted allegorical figure and Brueghel's minutely detailed accumulation of objects. Brueghel paints metallic surfaces — armour, helmets — with extraordinary reflective precision, differentiating polished steel from matte iron. Fabrics, animal fur, and human skin each receive distinct textural treatment through varied brushwork.