Art and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (1400-1800)

This introductory seminar will focus on the intersections between art and the five canonical senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – in early modern Europe. Though visual arts were obviously perceived primarily by means of sight, in recent years scholars have increasingly turned to thinking about how the other senses may have been implicated in the creation and historical reception of works of art. Readings discussed during class will address this issue from a variety of perspectives, ranging from straightforward representations of acts associated with a particular sense, to works of art that demanded the simultaneous engagement of multiple senses.

The point of departure for each class will be discussion of a specific text highlighting the multisensory character of early modern art and embodied modes of its reception, accompanied by analysis of the most important examples in a variety of media (painting, sculpture and architecture). The readings will revolve around a range of broader issues where the cultural role of the senses was particularly important, such as: the senses and early modern constructions of class and gender, sensory hierarchies in early modern colonial discourse, the changes in early modern sensorium and awareness of embodied experience as underpinnings of early modern art theory, the senses and religious devotion, the senses and discourse of (aesthetic) pleasure, the role of the senses in architectural and urban design, the culturally determined responses to multisensory reception of the arts. The iconographic themes (Noli me tangere, Doubting Thomas, Rising of Lazarus etc.) and genres (the nude, the still-life) underscoring the multisensory experience of the arts will also be analyzed, together with paradigmatic works evoking such responses (Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, Pluto and Persephone, Velazquez’s Las Meninas etc.). The issues of techniques, materials and devices enhancing multisensory response to the arts will also be examined, including the late painting techniques/brushwork of artists such as Titian, Velazquez, Rembrandt; the choice of materials in sculpture and architecture, as well as contrivances such as giochi d’acqua, imprisoning chairs, or hydraulic organs etc.

Svetlana Alpers, “The Master’s Touch,” in Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, Chicago, 1988, pp. 14-33

Daniel Arasse, “The Venus of Urbino, or the Archetype of the Glance,” in Rona Goffen (ed.), Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Cambridge, 1997, 91-107.

Barbara Arciszewska, “Villa, Villeggiatura and the Sensory Turn: Research Challenges and Opportunities”, in: B. Arciszewska (ed.), The Baroque Villa: Senses and Perceptions versus Materiality, Warszawa: Muzeum Pałac w Wilanowie, 2017, pp. 1-14.

Barbara Arciszewska, “Pompa Funebris in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth c. 1650-1750. Politics of court ritual and the realm of the senses”, in: H. Karner, E. Krems, J. Niebaum , W. Telesko (eds.), Sakralität des Herrschers an europäischen Höfen. Bau – Bild –Ritual – Musik (1648 – 1740), Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner Verlag, 2019, pp. 159-182.

Aristotle, De anima (On the Soul), trans. intro. notes. H. Lawson-Tancred (Harmondsworth, 1986), bk. II, chap. 7-11, pp. 173-86.

Sharon Assaf, “The Ambivalence of the Sense of Touch in Early Modern Prints,” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, n.s. 29, 1 (Winter 2005): pp. 75-98

Niall Atkinson, “The Social Life of the Senses: Architecture, Food, and Manners,” in in H. Roodenburg (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance, London, 2014, pp. 19-41.

Niall Atkinson, „The Republic of Sound: Listening to Florence at the Threshold of the Renaissance”, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 16, 2013, 57-84.

Barbara Baert, “’An Odour. A Taste. A Touch. Impossible to Describe’: Noli me Tangere and the Senses,” in: Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler (eds.), Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, Leiden, 2013, pp. 111-151.

Paul Barolsky, “Ovid, Bernini, and the Art of Petrification,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 13 (Fall, 2005), pp. 149-162.

Lisa Beaven, “Playing with objects: Engaging the senses in the Villa collections of Rome”, in: B. Arciszewska (ed.), The Baroque Villa: Senses and Perceptions versus Materiality, Warszawa: Muzeum Pałac w Wilanowie, 2017, pp.117-131.

Erin E. Benay and Lisa M. Rafanelli, chapters 4-6, Faith, Gender and the Senses in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art: Interpreting the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas, Farnham, 2015, pp. 123-228.

Benjamin Binstock, “Rembrandt’s Paint,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (1999), pp. 138-165.

Andrea Bolland, “Desiderio and diletto, Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne,” Art Bulletin 82 (2000), pp. 309-30.

June Di Schino, “The triumph of sugar sculpture in Italy 1500-1700,” in: Look and Feel: Studies in Texture, Appearance and Incidental Characteristics of Food, H. Walker (ed.) Totnes: Prospect, 1994.

Marine Ganofsky, “Sensuality and Voluptuousness: Materialism and Petites Maisons in Enlightenment France”, in: B. Arciszewska (ed.), The Baroque Villa: Senses and Perceptions versus Materiality, Warszawa: Muzeum Pałac w Wilanowie, 2017, pp. 211-222.

Christine Göttler, “The Temptation of the Senses at the Sacro Monte di Varallo,” in Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler (ed.), Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, Leiden, 2013, pp. 393-454.

Rona Goffen, “Paragone and the Goddess,” in Titian’s Women, New Haven, 1997, pp. 107-169.

Beth Harland and Nick Donnelly, “Art Spectatorship and Haptic Visuality: An Eye-Movement Analysis Exploring Painting and Embodied Cognition”, in: Ian Heywood (ed.) Sensory Arts and Design, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 175-187.

Elizabeth D. Harvey, "The Portal of Touch," American Historical Review 116 (2011), pp. 385-400

William Hood, “The Sacro Monte of Varallo: Renaissance Art and Popular Religion,” in Timothy Verdon (ed.), Monasticism and the Arts, Syracuse, 1984, pp. 291-311.

David Howes, "Architecture of the Senses", Montreal: CAA, 2005; http://www.david-howes.com/DH-research-sampler-arch-senses.htm

David Howes, “Charting the Sensorial Revolution,” The Senses and Society 1 (2006), pp. 113-28.

David Karmon and Christy Anderson, “Early modern spaces and olfactory traces” in: The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe. C. Richardson et al. (ed.), p. 354-370.

David R. Marshall, “Running from water: Giochi d’acqua and the sense of touch, in: B. Arciszewska (ed.), The Baroque Villa: Senses and Perceptions versus Materiality, Warszawa: Muzeum Pałac w Wilanowie, 2017, pp.131-143.

Carl Nordenfalk, “The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985), pp. 1-22, illustrations 1-9

Carl Nordenfalk, “The Five Senses in Flemish Art before 1600,” in Netherlandish Mannerism. Mationalmusei Skriftserie, n.s. 4 (1985), pp. 134-54

Carl Nordenfalk, “A unique Five-Senses Cycle of the 1620s,” in Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 59 (1990), pp 183-9

Alessandro Nova, “’Popular’ art in Renaissance Italy: Early Response to the Holy Mountain at Varallo,” in C. Farago (ed.), Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650, New Haven, 1995, pp. 112-126; 319-321.

Konrad Ottenheym. “Meat Halls and Fish markets in the Dutch Republic” in: Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe, Turnhout, 2010, pp. 273-284.

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, Oxford, 1994.

Mary Pardo, “Artifice as Seduction in Titian,” in James Grantham Taylor (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 55-89.

François Quiviger, “Art and the Senses: Representation and Reception of Renaissance Sensations,” in H. Roodenburg (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance, London, 2014, pp. 169-202

Lisa M. Rafanelli, “Thematizing Vision in the Renaissance: The Noli Me Tangere as a Metaphor for Art Making,” in Alice E. Sanger and Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker (eds.), Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice, Farnham, 2012, pp. 149-68.

David Rosand, “Titian and the Eloquence of the Brush,” Artibus et Historiae 2 (1981), pp. 85-96

David Rosand, “The Stroke of the Brush,” in: The Meaning of the Mark: Leonardo and Titian, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1988, pp. 49-93

Franciszek Skibiński, ‘Politics, pleasure and sensuality in the Seventeenth-century Villa in Poland-Lithuania, in: B. Arciszewska (ed.), The Baroque Villa: Senses and Perceptions versus Materiality, Warszawa: Muzeum Pałac w Wilanowie, 2017, pp.197-204.

Mark Smith, “Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History,” Journal of Social History 40 (2007), pp. 841-58 (JSTOR)

Nicola Suthor, Rembrandt’s Roughness, Princeton, 2018, pp. 17-33.

Allie Terry-Fritsch, “Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind: Somaesthetic Style and Devotional Practice at the Sacro Monte di Varallo,” Open Arts Journal 4 (2014-15), pp. 112-130.

Genevieve Warwick, Bernini: Art as Theatre, New Haven, 2012, pp. 78-129

Ernst Van de Wetering, “Rembrandt’s Brushwork and Illusionism; an Art-Theoretical Approach,” in Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, (rev. ed.), Berkeley, 2009, pp. 154-191

Rudolf Wittkower, “Sacri Monti in the Italian Alps,” in: Idea and Image: Studies in the Italia

During classes students will get acquainted with the fundamental concepts and methodological instruments deployed in sensory approaches to early modern art. Students will also master the key ideas underpinning constructions of early modern sensorium and their cultural determinants. Among skills honed during the meetings will be expertise in analytical examination of art form, backed by interpretive discourses concerning early modern culture. The classes will also offer an opportunity to develop advanced competences in critical reading of literary and visual texts.

Evaluation based on a short review of a selected piece of literature (1-2 pages) (20%), and 8-10-page essay (80%) as well as class participation.