Fleeting

F l e e t i n g S cen t s i n Co lo ur

fleeting scents in colour

fleeting

A ri a ne va n S uc h t e l e n an d Liz z ie M a r x

scents in colour Ja ap E v e rt A b r a h a m s e I n e k e H u ys m a n Bi a nc a M . d u M o rt ie r C aro Ve r b eek

Mauritshuis The Hague Wa anders publishers Z wolle

The exhibition Fleeting – Scents in Colour was made possible by Friends of the Mauritshuis Foundation Dutch Masters Foundation Prince Bernhard Culture Fund Zabawas Foundation M.A.O.C. Gravin van Bylandt Foundation The exhibition has been supported by the Dutch government: an indemnity grant has been provided by the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands on behalf of the Minister of Education, Culture and Science.

8 Foreword

Martine Gosselink

Smell, Art and Perception

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Fleeting – Scents in Colour. An Introduction Ariane van Suchtelen A Whiff of Time – What Our Noses Can Tell Us About the Past Caro Verbeek Smell as One of the Five Senses Ariane van Suchtelen Odours in Art – Depicting the Invisible Lizzie Marx

The Smell of Daily Life

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‘Sweet-Smelling’ in the Seventeenth Century: On Hygiene and Body Odours Bianca M. du Mortier Smell and Health Lizzie Marx ‘Vostre Illustrissime Saleté’: Stench as an Environmental Problem in the Cities of Holland Jaap Evert Abrahamse Odours from Overseas Lizzie Marx

Perfumery

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Perfume and Books of Secrets Lizzie Marx Constantijn Huygens: Amateur Perfumer Ineke Huysman

119 Notes 121 Literature 124 Exhibited Works

Foreword During the preparations for Fleeting – Scents in Colour, Ariane van Suchtelen, the curator of this exhibition, took me completely by surprise when she showed me the artworks she wished to present in this spectacle of whiffs, scents and fumes. She introduced me to a new world, the world of smell – as immense as it is intangible.

During our talks I became more aware of the human sense of smell in general, but also of my own nose and how it functions. It began already with the simple realisation that ‘smell’, used as a verb, has two meanings. You can actively smell something, such as the odour of a burning fire or the scent of a rose. But you can also say to someone, ‘you smell’, which is usually not meant as a compliment.

That you can both smell something and smell of something is indicative of the allencompassing nature of the notion of smell. It seems unbelievable, but as babies we can in fact distinguish very precisely between the smell of our own mother and that of another. It is a smell we connect with security, with that one and only mother, and the care and nourishment she gives us. Breathing in that smell thus creates a bond, which in turn enables us, later in life, to form new bonds. This primordial function of smell continues to work throughout adulthood. After all, we choose our partners largely on the basis of their pheromones .

So it has a reproductive function, this nose of ours, and it is an admonisher, too. If we catch a whiff of illness or death, our nose tells us: stay away! But does the nose also warn us of other calamities? Does it make us aware of people with evil intentions?

Not for nothing are there so many expressions that refer to a smell or the sense of smell: for example, ‘he was in bad odour with the sovereign’, ‘there’s something fishy about that’, ‘he smelled a rat’. The olfactory organ began to fascinate me more and more, and I slowly came to realise why the nose protrudes from the face: as we are told in this book, the nostrils function as gatekeepers that closely monitor everything before it enters our mouth.

I read somewhere that we tend to sniff our hand just after shaking hands with someone, because the body odour of that person informs us of possible illnesses, fears and emotions. All of this happens unconsciously, although a blind man once told me that his sense of smell was so highly developed that he could detect another person’s cold sweat. But, I suddenly thought, if our body odour is such an important messenger, why do we so scrupulously scrub it away with all kinds of bath soaps and shower gels? Maybe we should adopt the seventeenth-century practice of

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deodorising our armpits with artichoke juice. Indeed, things have become truly paradoxical. Why do we emerge from the shower, perfectly clean, only to perfume ourselves with stimulating fragrances made of ingredients from the anal and other olfactory glands of such animals as civet cats and musk deer? The fact that perfumers have been using these ingredients for centuries emerges from Constantijn Huygens’s diverse collection of recipes for balsams, powders, scented confectionery, aromatic sachets, fragrant balls for pomanders, perfumed bags and gloves.

When I was shown the townscape by Jan van der Heyden, with the stinking Oudezijds Voorburgwal in Amsterdam – and the public toilet right next to the washing place! – I wondered if those seventeenth-century city-dwellers weren’t so used to the everpresent stench that they no longer smelled it. After all, five minutes after putting on perfume, you scarcely notice it anymore. Even so, the stench of the canals must have been extremely pungent, otherwise the Amsterdam town council would not have spent centuries trying to combat it. We human beings are ultimately capable of distinguishing thousands of smells, whether habitual or novel, stale or fresh, tempting or intoxicating. This makes the sense of smell the most sensitive of the Five Senses.

And to think that all those thousands of odours are as intangible as they are invisible!

How difficult it must be for artists to portray something that is definitely there, but cannot be seen. The different ways in which they nevertheless managed to meet this challenge are convincingly shown in this exhibition.

We are greatly indebted to our lenders: museums in the Netherlands and abroad, as well as several private foundations, all of which were willing to part temporarily with their precious works of art. Without their generosity, this exhibition could not have taken place. Ariane van Suchtelen, who devised and developed the conceptual framework of Fleeting – Scents in Colour, is the exhibition’s curator. She is also one of the authors and the editor of this book. Lizzie Marx, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and the research and exhibition assistant for this project with support from the AHRC Student Development Fund, is writing a dissertation on the visualisation of smell in Dutch art. She shares some of the results of her research in her contributions to this book. We are also grateful to the external authors, Jaap Evert Abrahamse, Ineke Huysman, Bianca du Mortier and Caro Verbeek, for their inspiring contributions.

Various smells, concocted specially for this exhibition, can be sniffed by visitors while viewing the art on display. For this unique addition to the show, we relied on the

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expertise of Caro Verbeek, an art and smell historian. The smells, which were made by perfumers of International Flavors & Fragrances, led by Bernardo Fleming, can be experienced not only in the exhibition, but also in a separate ‘smell tour’ through the museum’s permanent collection, during which the various smell themes are explored further. After the close of the exhibition, this special tour will continue to exist in an adapted form. We hope this will serve to expand and diversify our public, so that it includes, for example, people with sensory impairments.

Every member of the project group responsible for Fleeting – Scents in Colour (under the supervision of project manager Hedwig Wösten) has contributed to the successful realisation of the exhibition. Its design was entrusted to OPERA Amsterdam, advised

by Studio Louter. A crucial part of the show’s presentation is a corona-proof method of allowing visitors to experience the various smells. To this end, the designer devised an ingenious system, whereby aromatic molecules are released into a funnel operated by a foot pump. Gert Jan Slagter is responsible for the attractive design of this book, published by Waanders Publishers. A fragrant bookmark ensures that readers of this book have something to smell while perusing its contents. The generous support of the Friends of the Mauritshuis Foundation, the Dutch Masters Foundation, Prince Bernhard Culture Fund, the Zabawas Foundation and the M.A.O.C. Gravin van Bylandt Foundation, was vital to the realisation of this exhibition.

Fleeting – Scents in Colour lends words and images to invisible, intangible and impermanent smells, to an earthly phenomenon that is crucially important to our daily social interaction. I wish you a pleasant trip through these intoxicating images and stories, preferably with your eyes and your nostrils wide open. marti ne g o ss e li n k Director

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Smell, Art and Perception

Fleeting – Scents in Colour An Introduction Ariane van S uchtelen

For an instant we imagine we really are witnessing the scene Pieter de Hooch has conjured up for us: the hushed, unhurried atmosphere surrounding two women who stand in front of an open linen cupboard in a clean and polished house (detail left, p. 53). Seemingly realistic scenes of everyday life in the seventeenth century sometimes create the illusion that we can actually catch a glimpse of that vanished world. The suggestion of smell is so strong that the canvas seems to exude the smell of clean laundry and freshly mopped floor tiles. Would we experience the painting differently if we could get a whiff of the linen cupboard while gazing at this scene? An important quality of smell is its capacity to evoke a very physical sense of presence – as though we are there ourselves. The acts of looking and smelling can enhance one another to become an intense experience. As a special feature of this exhibition, a number of historical odours have been re-created that visitors can sniff while viewing the works of art. But can we, in fact, smell the past and the art of the past?

Smells have a direct influence on our emotions and can penetrate to the deepest layers of our (sub) consciousness – our olfactory memory is strong and intuitive. We cannot see the countless odours that surround us; we can only smell them. They force themselves upon us in an endless spectrum ranging from pleasant and agreeable to repulsive or terrifying. The exhibition Fleeting – Scents in Colour focuses on the representation of smells and the sense of smell in the art of the seventeenth century; it is about odours of the past, about the role smells can play in stories, about olfactory suggestion in works of art, and about sensory perception. The perception of a smell is culturally determined and strongly bound to time and place, as well as to one’s milieu, social position and background. What associations did smells evoke and which meanings were attached to them three or four centuries ago?

Can our sense of smell help us get closer to the past?

And what can research into historical odours offer us in the way of narratives and insights?

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A Manifesto

Even though smell is the subject of the exhibition and visitors are invited to take a whiff of various odours, it is the artworks themselves that largely tell the story. That is the paradox of a visualart exhibition that focuses on an intangible phenomenon such as smell. A fundamental point, however, is that the visual arts have the capacity to do more than merely depict the visible world – in fact, it’s all about illusion and suggestion. Our olfactory memory is actually highly sensitive to suggestion; indeed, art has the means to trigger our mental capacity to summon smells.

The exhibition opens with the self-portrait of the Utrecht painter Johannes van Wijckersloot: a painting that can almost be read as a painterly manifesto (fig. 1; p. 51, fig. 4). It is a multi-layered composition with rebus-like references to the Five Senses, of which Smell occupies a prominent place.

The message is that a good painter has the ability to appeal to all the senses and to portray every facet of sensory perception. The young man at lower right, portrayed on the skin of the hand-drum, holds his nose against the stench rising from the fuming rope lying in front of the drum. The smell depicted moves effortlessly from one imaginary reality to another. The entire composition – not all details of which have been ‘puzzled out’ – can be considered an ode to painting, which is capable of portraying everything on earth, no matter how fleeting. We can almost smell the foul odour of the burning rope.

Themes and Perspectives

The perspectives presented by this exhibition are both art-historical and more generally historical in nature. The immensity of the subject is limited by a selection of paintings, prints and other works from the period that is the focus of the Mauritshuis’s collection: the Dutch seventeenth century (with excursions to the late sixteenth and early eighteenth century). After the prelude consisting of Van Wijckersloot’s self-portrait, we move on to prints and paintings that portray Smell

Smell and Health Liz zie Mar x

On 19 December 1601, a colossal sperm whale landed on the shores of Beverwijk (fig. 1). As its body lay stranded on the beach and began to decay, visitors came to witness the spectactle. Most of them interpreted the arrival of the sperm whale as a bad omen, and its ominous prophecy was duly fulfilled when plague afflicted Amsterdam in 1601 and 1602.1 More epidemics followed, as before the Netherlands faced its final great plague outbreak in 1668, pestilence was almost constantly present. As Dutch cities rapidly expanded in the seventeenth century, with populations growing up to five times in size, living and working space became increasingly confined, which inevitably came with health risks.2 Disease was commonly believed to originate in stagnant or putrefying matter, and to spread through odoriferous air. For instance, in 1642, a pamphlet issued in Leiden denounced ‘the weavers, combers, and spinners, who all work with oil, piss, and other stinking fat, which has infected the air to such a degree that one can not go through the streets without inhaling the dirty and stinking air’.3 Beyond the confines of the city, the countryside’s air was fresher, however marshlands and stagnant water were approached with caution, as they were thought to emit noxious fumes.

Airborne Pestilence

In 1682, Theodoor van der Schuer (1634-1707) painted a disturbing vision of the plague for the pesthouse boardroom of Leiden (fig. 2). A woman with a pallid complexion and a troubling sore on her chest reclines in the sick room with other patients.

Two carers enter the scene to aid the suffering as they cover their noses. Their reactions are in response to the overwhelming stench exuded from the sick, but they may also be taking protective measures that follow the medical theory of the time. Released from the bodies of the sick patients was a foul smell that would have been recognised as airborne pestilence that was potentially fatal.

On the other hand, scents could also yield curative properties. For instance, the glass vessel beside the patient depicted by Van der Schuer is likely to contain a potent mixture of rosewater and

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vinegar infused with fragrant ingredients. It was recommended to place such a fragrance at the bedside of a plague victim to cleanse the air of harmful odours.4 In the seventeenth century, the home was believed to be purified of disease by scattering fragrances in the fireplace or burning an aromatic pastille, which consisted of fragrant ingredients bound in gum. This three-tiered incense burner of 1678, attributed to the silversmith Mattheus Loockemans (1649-1719) from The Hague (fig.

3), was made for the English household of Hans Willem Bentinck, the future Earl of Portland.5 An aromatic pastille could be burned over hot coals, causing fragrant fumes to seep through its open silverwork. More common than this luxurious incense burner were pomanders, filled with fragrant ingredients that could protect against the plague. This Frisian silver pomander in the shape of a skull splits open to reveal a chilling engraved inscription on the compartment’s divider, ‘heeden leven/ Morgen doot’ (‘alive today/ Dead tomorrow’) (figs. 4-5).6 During bouts of plague, the message would have been self-evident.7

The Anatomical Theatre

A medley of scents was painted by Michiel and Pieter van Mierevelt (1566-1641, 1596-1623) in the anatomical lesson of the Head Surgeon of Delft, Dr Willem van der Meer (fig. 6). Van der Meer stands at the painting’s centre with scalpel poised, having dissected the cadaver’s abdomen. In the anatomical theatre, fragrance is used to protect the assembly from the harmful odours that were believed to be released by the corpse, and to foster an environment of learning without the distraction of decay. Observers arm themselves against the stench with aromatics, such as smouldering sticks of incense held by the second man from the left, and third from the lower-right. Pieter van Mierevelt portrays himself in profile on the right with a sprig of herbs, and beside him another man holds a laurel branch. Before the cadaver, incense smokes from a small stove and the lit candle is scented too.8

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1 Jan Saenredam, Beached Whale at Beverwijk, 1602.

Engraving, 411 x 597 mm.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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2 Theodoor van der Schuer, Plague Victims in the Hospital, 1682.

Canvas, 134.9 x 163.2 cm. Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden

4 Pomander in the form of a skull, Friesland, 1600-1620. Silver, h. 2.6 cm.

Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (Gift of Joost Hiddes Halbertsma)

5 Opened pomander (same as in fig. 4), displaying the inscription: ‘heeden leven / Morgen doot’ (‘alive today / Dead tomorrow’)

3 The Hague, probably Mattheus Loockemans, Incense burner, 1678. Silver, h. 35.6 cm.

Portland Collection, England

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6 Michiel and Pieter van Mierevelt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Willem van der Meer, 1617. Canvas, 144 x 198 cm.

Museum Prinsenhof, Delft

Van der Meer discussed some of the insights he gained from his dissections in an exchange of letters with the medical student Johan Neander. They were published in Neander’s book Tabacologia, printed in Latin in 1622, and then translated into French in 1626. Van der Meer acknowledged that Pieter Pauw, who founded the Leiden anatomical theatre in 1597, had claimed to have discovered sooty traces of tobacco residing in the brain of a heavy smoker in one of his earliest dissections. But Van der Meer, who was an advocate of tobacco, refuted Pauw’s claim by means of dissections he conducted on

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smokers between 1615 and 1618.9 As no such sooty matter could be found lining the cadavers’ brain, Van der Meer used the findings from his dissections to illustrate the medicinal virtues of tobacco.

The Second Nose

In the Early Modern period, the nose was not the only organ that was believed to be sensitive to smell. Women were believed to have a second olfactory organ: the womb. It was a belief upheld in ancient Egypt and perpetuated by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and his followers. It was

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7 Jan Steen, The Doctor’s Visit, c.1665-1668. Panel, 60.5 x 48.5 cm.

Mauritshuis, The Hague

Detail of fig. 7

thought that when a woman was unwell, her womb could get restless and move from its natural position in the pelvic cavity and, as a result, ‘wander’ around in the body, impacting other organs. The afflicted womb was thought to cause numerous symptoms including drowsiness, swooning, fits that made the body contort, excessive laughing and weeping, and even madness.10 Minnekoorts (love fever), the melancholy that comes from frustrated love, was believed to ail the womb, and although a lasting cure for the disease would have been provided by marriage (meaning sexual intercourse), there was also a short-term remedy. The womb – which was thought to be attracted to pleasant smells and repelled by foul smells – could be manipulated back into position by using odours: it could be lured into its correct position by aromatics such as musk (a secretion of the musk deer), laurel, and cloves that were heated in an incense burner placed under a woman’s skirts. The fumigation would be directed upwards and enter the body towards the womb.

It could also be chased downwards by having the patient smell asafoetida (dried gum from a plant native of Iran), a freshly snuffed candle, or the fumes of burning human or goat hair.11 In one of Jan Steen’s (1626-1679) depictions of a sick woman in consultation with a quack doctor, a blue lace smoulders in a little coal stove, and it emits a pungent odour (fig. 7). Some scholars have interpreted the burning lace as a pregnancy test; if the woman was sensitive to its odour, it was taken to be a symptom of pregnancy. However, it is more likely that its functions were to rouse the woman from swooning (a symptom of minnekoorts), and to drive the restless womb back to its natural place.12

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In an extraordinary anatomical flap book, the womb’s sensitivity to smell is connected to creating life (figs. 8-9). Johann Remmelin (1583-1632), the anatomist of the German town Ulm, with the engraver Lucas Kilian (1579-1637) produced the Latin book in 1613. It was printed in at least five other languages, including Dutch, first published in 1634. The book served as an anatomy lesson on paper, as the printed figures in the volume can be opened up to reveal layer upon layer of delicate paper organs. The female anatomy is modelled by Eve, identifiable by the snake with an apple branch at her feet. Between Eve’s legs there is a burning phoenix giving off thick smoke. According to Ovid, every five hundred years the phoenix constructed a fragrant nest of cinnamon, myrrh, and other spices that would burn in clouds of incense, and in its place a new phoenix was born.13 In the anatomical print, the phoenix’s pyre releases sweet scents, which would have made a fine formula for a womb fumigation. As the phoenix smokes between Eve’s legs, the medical theory suggests that her womb is lured to its optimum position for procreation.

This motif may illustrate that womankind, represented by Eve, is able to regenerate like the phoenix through creating children within a fragranced womb.14 A rare illustration of an aromatic fumigation was printed in De tien vermakelikheden des houwelyks (The Ten Pleasures of Marriage), published in 1678 by the Amsterdam writer and bookseller Hieronymus Sweerts. The opening illustration of one of the chapters of this satirical book shows a woman receiving fumigation treatment, with great clouds of smoke blowing

8, 9 Johann Remmelin and Lucas Kilian, Pinax microcosmographicus: The Body of Eve, 1667. Engraving, 485 x 335 mm.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (on the right the woman’s body is partly opened)

out from beneath her skirts (fig. 10). The accompanying text reads that the midwives use such large quantities of aromatic remedies that it becomes hazardous for the patient, as they ‘make the bed and whole house so full of stink and vapours, that it may be said they rather stop the good and wholesom pores and other parts of the body’.15 Sweerts’ book makes clear that towards the close of the century, the ability of the womb to wander had become very doubtful, and aromatic

therapies for the womb came to be portrayed as a quack remedy.16 While aromatic therapies for the womb have been rejected in Western medicine, it lingers to this day under the guise of cosmetic treatment.17 In the seventeenth century, odours were understood to have a remarkable amount of agency in the body.

Scents had the potential to manipulate the womb and supposedly increase its ability to procreate;

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and combinations of aromatics administered through an incense burner or a pomander were believed to protect against disease, but one ill-fated sniff could lead to certain death. Recently, the pandemic has forced us to renew our awareness of the dangers of the spread of disease through the air, yet since the carriers of disease are identified as micro-organisms, odours are now comparatively powerless.

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10 Hieronymus Sweerts, De tien vermakelikheden des houwelyks (The Ten Pleasures of Marriage), 1678, opposite p. 60. Engraving, 65 x 115 mm.

Library, University of Amsterdam