Image source: wikiart.org
Introduction
“Smell” (1618) unfolds as an enveloping garden where fragrance becomes visible. The eye wanders through beds of lilies, irises, peonies, roses, and tulips; a silver fountain purls at the center; peacocks fan their tails on the lawn; a stone terrace and palace recede into a cool green distance. At the lower right, Venus reclines on a dark cloth while Cupid teases her with blossoms freshly cut from overflowing pots. The entire scene is a living herbarium, a theatre of scent staged with the gentle pomp of a princely estate. The painting invites the viewer to experience the sense of smell through color, texture, and atmosphere, translating aroma into light.
Historical Context
The image belongs to a celebrated cycle devoted to the Five Senses, created in Antwerp when collectors delighted in allegories combining erudition with lush craft. The partnership pairs grand, supple figures with an almost scientific attention to flora, vessels, animals, and garden architecture. That dual authorship mirrors the subject: the bond between visceral sensation and cultivated taste. The garden is not wild; it is ordered, stocked with botanical rarities, and set against the civilizing frame of terraces, alleys, and a stately house. It reflects the early seventeenth century’s fascination with plant collecting, spice routes, and the pleasure gardens of elite households where fragrance was both luxury and knowledge.
The Allegory of Smell
Allegory works here by abundance and proximity. Smell cannot be painted directly, so the picture assembles its effects: heaps of blossoms freshly cut; potted specimens pushed close to the viewer; garlands strewn on the ground; an apothecary’s corner where distilling vessels and shelves hint at perfumes, pomanders, and herbal remedies; animals whose musk and pelts suggest a second register of scent. Venus and Cupid act as personifications but also as participants—she sampling a flower’s perfume with a reflective smile, he offering another bloom with childlike insistence. The garden itself is the instrument of smell, and the breeze plays it.
Composition and Spatial Design
The composition fans out like the fragrance it describes. A dense cluster of flowers fills the lower foreground, then opens to an oval of lawn with fountain and birds, then narrows again into tree-lined alleys that converge in the distance. The right and left margins rise in vertical walls of blossoms, setting the garden like a perfumed amphitheatre. At the painter’s lower right, a pocket of intimacy gathers Venus, Cupid, a sleeping civet cat, and a small dog, while the middle distance hosts gardeners trimming arbors and drawing water. The spatial rhythm—near, mid, far—becomes a choreography of aroma: strong and complex nearby, lighter and mingled as air takes it away.
The Flora as a Taxonomy of Fragrance
The painting doubles as a botany of scent. Heavy-headed peonies and damask roses supply warm, wine-like perfume. Lilies and irises add high, cool notes that cut through sweetness. Carnations, pinks, and gillyflowers suggest spicy clove and pepper; narcissi and jonquils, a spring tang; orange blossom and jasmine, a honeyed citrus haze. Herbs tucked among the blooms—possibly rosemary, thyme, or lavender—bring resin and camphor to balance. Flowers are presented in multiple states: rooted in beds, potted in Delftware and terracotta, freshly cut in baskets, and strewn as garlands. That variety is not merely decorative; it implies the full life cycle of scent from soil to bouquet.
Venus and Cupid as Sensory Anchors
The figures bring warmth and psychology to the garden’s profusion. Venus’s body is modeled in large, confident planes of light, a quiet counterweight to the intricate filigree of leaves and petals. Seated on a dark satin drape, she lifts a flower toward her face with a gesture that is both contemplative and playful. Cupid stands with a fistful of blooms, his wings catching cool highlights, eager to multiply the experiment. Their placement among potted plants emphasizes that smell is intimate and chosen, not merely ambient. The goddess does not drown in fragrance; she selects, tests, and savors—an allegory of discernment.
Animals, Civet, and the Natural Sources of Perfume
The menagerie enriches the sensory register. Peacocks stride over the lawn, their iridescence a visual analogue to showy, heady scents. Hares and deer glance through the alleys, adding the freshness of woodland musk. On the grass near Venus curls a civet cat—a telling inclusion, since civet paste, used in early modern perfumery to fix and deepen scents, came from such animals. A small dog watches with bright attention, a domestic foil to the civet’s exoticism. Together they anchor the painting’s argument that smell arises where culture refines nature rather than suppressing it.
Objects of Distillation and the Art of Perfume
At the left margin, within a shaded garden room, vessels, pipes, and jars gather on shelves and tables. A figure tends apparatus that could be used for distilling aromatics into oils or waters. This corner makes the allegory practical. The garden’s beauty is not only for strolling; it is a laboratory and pantry supplying ointments, scented gloves, medicinal syrups, and pomanders. The arts of cultivation and chemistry meet in a domestic economy of fragrance that reflects global exchange—spices from abroad married to blossoms from local beds.
Light, Color, and the Atmosphere of Aroma
The light has a humid tenderness consistent with a perfumed morning. It is not the hard clarity of noon but a pearly illumination that allows colors to bloom without glare. Greens dominate in a dozen shades—from mint to olive to black spruce—against which the reds, whites, blues, and yellows of flowers sing. The fountain’s spray catches silver light, a cooling punctuation amid warm petals. Color here works like tone in music: deep rose peonies serve as bass, irises and cornflowers carry the treble, and thick greens hold harmony. The total effect is synesthetic: one seems to smell with the eyes because color and value have been tuned to suggest the air’s weight.
Texture and the Translation of Scent into Touch
Smell is close to touch; both are intimate senses. The painting respects this by rendering textures that the eye can almost feel. Velvet petals curl with thick softness; lily throats glow waxy and cool; glazed pottery reflects a damp gleam; moss creeps in matte cushions; satin gathers in liquid folds beneath Venus. The civet’s fur looks dense and warm; peacock feathers are crisp and glassy. Each surface asks the viewer to imagine contact, and from contact the mind leaps to aroma: crush a rose and scent blooms; split a lemon leaf and citrus oils rise.
The Garden as Theatre and Map
Paths, arbors, and water features carve the grounds into rooms. A central alley, shaded by tall trees, draws the eye like a scented corridor toward fountains and distant statuary. On the left a tower and pavilion peep through foliage; on the right a long façade, perhaps a gallery or orangery, hints at winter storage for tender plants. The design fuses Italianate planning with northern abundance, a map of taste that values both spectacle and botanical variety. Visitors in the middle distance gesture, converse, and work, keeping the garden social and alive rather than monumental and empty.
Time of Day and Season
The sky suggests early summer or late spring, the primary season of bloom in northern Europe when roses, peonies, irises, and lilies overlap. The hour is morning or late afternoon, when air carries fragrance best and heat hasn’t flattened petals. Dew or recent watering remains in the soil. Even the faint haze beyond the trees implies humidity, a perfect conductor of scent. The painting compresses a season’s peak into a single, lasting hour.
Collaboration and Complementary Virtuosity
The painting’s dual strengths—robust figure style and jewel-like still life—create a partnership that mirrors the subject’s own duality. Smell is both body and culture; it belongs to a goddess and to gardeners. The figures provide warmth and focus; the thousands of botanical particulars give credibility and delight. Neither dominates. The harmony persuades the viewer that the senses are most rewarding when refined by knowledge and anchored in humane pleasure.
Symbolic Meanings of Flowers
Each bloom carries inherited meanings that enrich the allegory without turning it didactic. Roses signal love and secrecy; lilies purity and majesty; irises faith and royal messenger; carnations constancy; tulips worldly fashion; jasmine and orange blossom joy and fertility. Arranged together around Venus, they declare a bouquet of virtues—love seasoned by purity, constancy graced by joy, fashion tempered by faith. The strewn petals at her feet suggest that pleasure is not hoarded but shared and spent, like fragrance released by handling.
The Human Scale Amid Profusion
Despite its encyclopedic ambition, the painting protects human intimacy. Venus and Cupid occupy a low, comfortable pocket of grass; a bowl, a basket, simple garden tools lie nearby; the fountain at their side is small enough to touch. The viewer kneels beside them in imagination, close enough to hear the water and to smell the flowers that Cupid presses into her hand. That nearness keeps the allegory from becoming spectacle. The sense of smell is personal, tied to memory, and the picture honors that by staging its richness around a private exchange.
How to Look
Begin near Venus’s hand and follow the path of blossoms upward to Cupid’s arm, then across the ribbon of garlands to the blue-dappled irises on the lawn. Step to the fountain’s cool ring and watch its spray catch light; turn toward the peacocks and let their iridescence lead you down the central alley into the pale distance. Return along the right-hand border of climbing roses and rounded hydrangea tufts, and finally settle again among the terracotta and Delft pots, where soil spills and leaves brush the rim. This slow circuit is the visual counterpart to breathing deeply among flowers.
Legacy and Resonance
“Smell” helped fix a northern tradition in which landscape, still life, and allegory could coexist without hierarchy. It taught later painters that the senses could be celebrated by building worlds that operate credibly at every scale—from dew on a petal to the sweep of an alley. For contemporary viewers, the painting resonates as an image of replenishment. In an anxious age, the garden promises an economy of care: seeds saved, beds tended, perfumes distilled, pleasures shared. It argues gently that refinement is not denial but attention.
Conclusion
This painting translates an invisible sense into a visible climate. It does so by marrying the warmth of mythic figures with the disciplined joy of botanical observation, by populating a princely garden with creatures, tools, vessels, and flowers that all radiate meaning. Fragrance becomes geometry, color, and texture; discernment becomes a goddess’s lifted hand; abundance becomes a lawn where peacocks stroll and fountains whisper. “Smell” is therefore not only an allegory of a single sense but a manifesto for a life tuned to the world through care, knowledge, and delight.