by Jon Lackman | 26 October 2010 | Books, Museums
Various recent books and exhibitions have examined art’s interaction with the non-visual senses. “The Record,” now at Duke’s Nasher Museum, “is the first museum exhibition to explore the culture of vinyl records within the history of contemporary art.” Patrizia Di Bello and Gabriel Kourea recently edited Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present (read their introduction [pdf]). They ask,
Should sight trump the other four senses when experiencing and evaluating art? From the nineteenth century onward, notions of synaesthesia and the multi-sensorial were important to a series of art movements from Symbolism to Futurism and Installations … We have inherited an art history dominated by the visual, in both its Modernist developments, and its critiques since. The visual has been privileged as a rational source of knowledge, able to transcend lowly sensuality, while the proximity senses have been marginalized by aesthetics, art history and criticism, disciplines that rely heavily on mechanical reproduction techniques that have been available since the nineteenth century but only for sight and sound … [H]owever, artists from the nineteenth
century onwards have increasingly challenged, disregarded or worked outside the hegemony of sight by producing works that include, or powerfully evoke, non-visual elements.
In the well-illustrated recent book The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art Warburg Institute librarian François Quiviger notes, “At the core of Renaissance art theory is the assertion that painting, sculpture and architecture are liberal arts, intellectual disciplines, the practice of which required the exercise of the mind, not the body. It would be a mistake, however to think that this intellectualization excluded the realm of the senses.” Quiviger’s approach is to apply “ideas, tested in the field of anthropology, which assert that a culture can be characterized through the ways in which it organizes the sensorium (the sensory system).” Quiviger’s book devotes individual chapters to each of the five senses, after investigating Renaissance art’s general attitudes towards the body and sensation. (This is a scholarly book, published by Reaktion; it is however also the first such book I’ve read that quotes uncritically from a Wikipedia article.) In the particularly stimulating chapter on smell, Quiviger writes:
Titian’s so-called Venus of Urbino rests on a mattress with a floral motif suggestive of such rose-filled cushions. She is rubbing and scattering roses with the fingers of her right hand while she dips the fingertips of her left hand in her pudenda – another particularly scented zone of her body which we are seemingly invited to compare in olfactory and tactile terms with the roses held in the other hand … Recent research has suggested that such pictures would normally hang in bedchambers, above the bed, and were consequently visible during the act of procreation … According to one commentator, Titian represented the young spouse waiting in the nuptial chamber. The gesture of her left hand would suggest that she is following precepts enumerated by St Antoninus, bishop of Florence, intended to stimulate the dampness essential for procreation. The implicit olfactory assocation between the scent of the two hands does not seem to have been picked up by art historical literature. It has however already been observed as a banality by an anthropologist[.]
