The Five Senses in Willem II van Haecht's Cabinet of Cornelis van Der Geest

Abstract

Willem II van Haecht’s panel of the Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest (1628), introduces the viewer to the theme of the Five Senses by including five prominently displayed paintings, each corresponding to one of the senses, in the foreground. The paper offers a new reading of the panel, suggesting that this image may be read as an allegory of the Five Senses, proposing this theme as a key to the rhetorical performance the collector, van der Geest, is shown undertaking, and connecting the senses to the picture’s punning motto: Vive l’Esprit.

Notes

¹ Much has been written on this important painting and its owner, van der Geest, whom van Haecht served as curator as well as painter. The first extensive modern study is that by J. Held, ‘Artis Pictoriae Amator. An Antwerp Art Patron and his Collection’, Gazette des Beaux‐Arts, 50 (1957), 53–84 (reprinted, with addenda, in J. Held, Rubens and his Circle [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1982], 35–64, earlier literature noted at n. 19). Subsequent important studies include A. J. J. Delen, ‘Cornelis van der Geest, een groot figurer in de geschniedenis van Antwerpen’, Antwerpen, 5:2 (1959), 57–71; F. Badouin, Rubens et son siècle (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1972), 191–203; G. Schwartz, ‘Love in the Kunstkamer. Additions to the Work of Guillaume van Haecht’, Tableaux, 18:6 (1996), 43–52; B. Broos, Meesterwerken in het Mauritshuis (The Hague: Staatsuitgeveri, 1987), 162–74; F. Healy, ‘Vive l'Esprit: Sculpture as the Bearer of Meaning in Willem van Haecht's Art Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest’, in Munuscula Amicorum: Contributions on Rubens and his Colleagues in Honour of Hans Vlieghe, edited by K. Van der Strighelen, 2 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), vol. 2, 423–41; B. van Beneden, ‘Willem von Haecht: An Erudite and Talented Copyist’, in Room for Art in Seventeenth Century Antwerp, edited by A. van Suchtelen (The Hague, Antwerp and Waanders: Mauritshuis, Rubenshuis and Zwolle, 2009), 58–92.

² Iconographic analyses below support the assignation of each painting to one of the Five Senses.

³ The only comprehensive study of the topos of the Five Senses, though with an emphasis on the literary tradition, is L. Vinge, The Five Senses. Studies in a Literary Tradition (Lund: LiberLèaromedel, 1975). Studies in the visual tradition generally appear as isolated investigations into a particular artist's or period's system of depicting the Five Senses. The most seminal is H. Kauffmann, ‘Die Fünfsinne in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts’, in Kunstgeschichtliche Studien, edited by H. Tintelnot (Breslau: Gauverlag‐NS‐Schlesien, 1943), 133–57. The most wide‐ranging investigation of the visual topos is I cinque sensi nell'arte. Immagini del sentire, edited by S. Ferino‐Pagden (Milan: Leonardo Arte, 1996). For recent work on the Five Senses as a historically determined cultural concept, see Empire of the Senses. A Senses Cultural Reader, edited by D. Howes (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005).

⁴ Commonplaces, or location‐based clustering strategies used to draw attention to set topics and ordering systems such as the Five Senses, constitute fundamental modes of thinking inherent to the starting principles of Early Modern pedagogy, fully evident at all levels of humanist thought and intellectual inquiry during van Haecht's and van der Geest's lifetimes. For relevant bibliography, see below, n. 29

⁵ An example of sustained scholarship that focuses on this particular question, though in a time period immediately preceding the one investigated here, is C. Nordenfalk, ‘The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 48 (1985), 1–22 and ‘The Five Senses in Flemish Art before 1600’, in Netherlandish Mannerism, Papers Given at a Symposium in Nationalmuseum Stockholm, September 21–22, 1984, edited by G. Cavelli‐Björkman (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1985), 135–54.

⁶ C. Nordenfalk, ‘Le Cinq Sens dans l'Art du Moyen‐âge’, Revue de l'art, 34 (1976), 21–2.

⁷ Nordenfalk, ‘The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art’, 7.

⁸ After Nordenfalk, ‘The Five Senses in Flemish Art before 1600’, 143–4.

⁹ For examples by each artist, see Dirck Hals, Garden Party (early 1640s), oil on panel (location unknown); Abraham Bosse, Hearing (c.1635), oil on canvas (Musée des Beaux‐Arts, Tours); Simon de Vos, Allegory of the Five Senses (1640), oil on copper (private collection); Theodor Rombouts, Allegory of the Five Senses, oil on canvas (Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent); and Gérard de Lairesse, Allegory of the Five Senses (1668), oil on canvas (Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow).

¹⁰ E. de Jong, Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth‐Century Painting, translated by M. Hoyle (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2000). This argument is a common theme throughout this collection of essays concerning iconographic strategies employed by seventeenth‐century Dutch artists, although the chapter, ‘To Instruct and Delight’, is particularly valuable in this regard.

¹¹ Indeed, as Scheller has pointed out, encyclopaedic collections, such as those often depicted in pictures of collections, were prized for enabling the owner to move between the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intelligibilis. See R. W. Scheller, ‘Rembrandt en de encyclopedische kunstkamer’, Oud Holland, 84 (1969), 81–147; Filipczak, Picturing Art, 68. For works by Brueghel and Francken, see the contributions by Dupré, de Vries and Gage in this issue. Jaques Linard, The Five Senses (1638), oil on canvas (Musée des Beaux‐Arts, Strasbourg) and Giuseppe Recco, Still Life with the Five Senses (1676), oil on canvas (private collection). As Fiona Healy has pointed out, the theme of the Five Senses was popular among Antwerp painters of gallery interiors. Healy, ‘Vive l'Esprit’, 423.

¹² Rockox, we should note, is one of the figures depicted in the Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest. See Held, ‘Artis Pictoriae Amator’, 40.

¹³ On this series, see K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere (1568–1625). Die Gemälde mit kritischem Oeuvrekatalog (Köln: DuMont, 1979), 328–62; El Siglo de Rubens en el Museo del Prado. Catálogo Razonado de Pintura Flamenca del Siglo XVII (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1995); David Teniers, Jan Brueghel y los gabinetes de pinturas, edited by M. Díaz Padrón (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1992), 112–25.

¹⁴ The logistical difficulties of the highly fanciful division of the entire palace of the Regents into groups of rooms dedicated to each sense (not to mention the presence of nude allegorical figures and wild animals) makes it clear that this ordering of a collection is conceptual in nature and not an accurate recording of its actual physical organization. This may be compared to the fictional nature of van Haecht's picture, as noted in Held, ‘Artis Pictoriae Amator’, 39.

¹⁵ The identifications of the artists have been made in two sources, though the descriptive titles need no justification. See Held, Rubens and his Circle, 58; David Teniers, Jan Brueghel y los gabinetes de pinturas, 12. It should be noted that two versions of Wildens's painting exist, one in Dresden, Gemäldegalerie (illustrated in this article), the other in St Petersburg, The Hermitage.

¹⁶ While, as we have seen, the Five Senses remain a recurring theme and object of interest in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, stabilized, canonical identifications of each of the precise components (Sight, Hearing, Taste, Smell and Touch) appear only in Ancient Roman sources, and in modern thought from approximately 1690. The sense that one may loosely identify in English as ‘touch’ is perhaps the most varied, as its definition and associated range of human experiences fluctuate significantly throughout time. For instance, Shakespeare (as indicated below, n. 42) favours the term ‘feeling’ and includes both the set of experiences we may relate to a modern conventional understanding of ‘touch’ and the physical sensations of emotional response. However, as the lack of standardization in both English and Dutch terminology of the seventeenth century is characteristic of its time, and visual allegories of the period need only suggest limited aspects of even the most broadly defined sense in order to communicate meaning effectively, I allow myself similar flexibility in my choice of terms. See, for further information, E. R. Anderson, Folk‐Taxonomies in Early English (Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 319–21.

¹⁷ Van der Geest's actual collection strongly favoured and promoted celebrated past and contemporaneous Flemish artists. Esteem for Metsys in particular rose considerably in the seventeenth century, as evidenced by his centrality in literary constructions of the Antwerp school, van der Geest's own privileging of the artist's Madonna and Child, and the traditional account of van der Geest's (probably apocryphal) refusal to sell the panel to the Archduchess Isabella. See F. Fickaert, Metamorphosis ofte vvonderbaere veranderingh (Antwerp, 1648) and Held, ‘Artis Pictoriae Amator’, 61–3.

¹⁸ See Nordenfalk, ‘The Five Senses in Flemish art Before 1600’, at 137, 151 n. 9. H. W. Janson, Apes and Apelore in the Middle Ages, Studies of the Warburg Institute, vol. 20 (London: University of London, 1952), 239.

¹⁹ See S. Koslow, Frans Snyders. Peitre animalier et de natures mortes. 1597–1657 (Antwerp: Mercator Press, 1995).

²⁰ Additionally, as Healy has observed, ‘Van Haecht cleverly plays with established pictorial conventions and viewer expectations for such gallery paintings by substituting [in the Snyders painting] the personification of Taste with a symbolic representation of it that is demonstratively placed next to van der Geest.’ Healy, ‘Vive l'esprit’, 425.

²¹ The Danaë is signed clearly by van Haecht; indeed, it is the only visibly ‘signed’ work in the entire collection, but it is not clear whether the work was ever actually produced. It is not uncommon to find ‘imaginary’ works in pictures of collections.

²² This connection between light and vision is fundamental to theories of vision in antiquity and certainly into the Early Modern period. Though the precise nature of this relationship underwent numerous revisions, the influence of the foundation provided by Aristotle is shown in D. C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al‐Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1976), 6–9, 92–5.

²³ On which, see, e.g., L. Daston, J. Renn and H.‐J. Rheinberger, Visions, Max Planck Institute for History of Science Preprint 100 (Berlin: MPIWG, 1998).

²⁴ Nordenfalk, ‘The Five Senses in Flemish Art before 1600’, 136–7.

²⁵ We might note here that the search or ‘hunt’ for knowledge was regularly referred to and allegorized as a venatio in the Early Modern period. Given the pretensions to knowledge of the liefhebbers portrayed in pictures of collections, and the appearance of instruments of science alongside works of art in the Cabinet of Cornelius van der Geest, it is highly likely that the inclusion of Wildens's painting is intended to refer to this theme. See W. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), Chapter 8.

²⁶ The bibliography on this topic is large, but for a useful overview, see E. Hooper‐Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992).

²⁷ A typical and widely available example of a collection of such orderings (e.g. the planets, seasons, virtues, vices, etc.) is Petrach's allegorical poem, the Trionfi. See C. Appel, Die Triumphe Petrarcas (Halle: Max Niemer, 1901). Petrarch's organization of these themes into a triumphal procession precedes numerous print series using the same device. See Nordenfalk, ‘The Five Senses in Flemish Art before 1600’, 142, and 152, n. 32.

²⁸ J. Kenseth, ‘A World of Wonders in One‐Closet Shut’, in The Age of the Marvelous, edited by J. Kenseth (Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, 1991), 82–3.

²⁹ On commonplacing, see, e.g., W. J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1971); ‘Commonplace Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger, and Shakespeare’, in Classical Influences on European Culture, AD 1500–1700. Proceedings of an International Conference Held at King's College, Cambridge, April 1974, edited by R. R. Bolgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 91–126; A. Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); A. Blair, ‘Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53:4 (1992), 541–51.

³⁰ V. I. Stoichita, The Self‐Aware Image. An Insight into Early Modern Meta‐Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 134–47. While I agree wholeheartedly with this assessment, I contend that van der Geest's rhetorical performance with these images is centred around a much more focused argument: an evocation of the Five Senses.

³¹ R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 271–3. M. A. Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric (Zwolle: Waanders, 2002), 24–5, 66–7.

³² D. Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo (1512).

³³ For further discussion of the relationship between such ordering systems and collections in the Early Modern period, see Sister J. M. Lechner, OSU, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces: An Historical Investigation of the General and Universal Ideas Used in All Argumentation and Persuasion with Special Emphasis on the Educational and Literary Tradition of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Greenwood Publishing, 1962); M. Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 17–21; M. A. Meadow, ‘On the Structure of Knowledge in Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs’, Volkskundig Bulletin, 18:2 (1992), 141–69 and Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Netherlandish Proverbs, 83–97.

³⁴ We must instead look at the inhabitants of the painting as notable figures who had at one time or another visited the collection. The future king of Poland Wladislas Sigismund, it is observed, viewed the collection nine years after Albert and Isabella's visit. See Z. Z. Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp 1550–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 59.

³⁵ B. Welzel, ‘Galerien und Kunstkabinette als Orte des Gespräches’, Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung, 28 (1997), 495–504.

³⁶ Surprisingly little information about the nature of van Haecht's duties as van der Geest's curator has been offered to date, but see Held, Rubens and his Circle, 35–64.

³⁷ The identification of the figure in the doorway as van Haecht himself was first suggested by Held in ‘Artis Pictoriae Amator’, and has been generally accepted.

³⁸ See C. Classen, ‘Museum Manners: the Sensory Life of the Early Museum’, Journal of Social History, 40:4 (2007), 895–914. Classen's study of sensation in early museums underscores that one of the tasks of the curator was to give visitors to the collection a tour. The ability to set the proper balance between custodial supervision and instructional guidance to the visitor still remains the necessary qualification of a successful museum docent, although the standards of the visitor's physical engagement with the collection were obviously much less severe in van Haecht's age. Indeed, Early Modern visitors expected and were encouraged to both look and touch art and artefacts.

³⁹ It should be noted that Vive l'Esprit is not (no doubt on purpose) easy to translate or to gloss. While it may be rendered as ‘Long Live the Spirit’ it may equally be translated as ‘May the Spirit Live’, or even ‘Long Live Ingenuity’, the latter of which refers to the wit and ingenium of the liefhebbers portrayed in the gallery itself. See Filipczak, Picturing Art, 59. I am grateful to Alexander Marr for bringing this to my attention. Decorations involving personal emblematic mottos of this kind proceed from the long‐standing practice of the European elite to attach their names, personalities and ambitions to their homes, public commissions and specific rooms, including those housing parts of and the entireties of collections. Roville's 1551 Latin translation of Andreae Alciati's genre‐forming Emblematum flumen abundans goes so far as to recommend artists and artisans to keep a ‘little book of Emblems at hand’ to aid in the application of such decorations to the ‘walls of houses, on windows of glass, on tapestry, on hangings, on tablets, vases, ensigns, seals, garments, the table, the couch, the arms, the sword, and lastly, furniture of every kind’. Andreae Alciati Emblematum flumen abundans; or, Alciat's Emblems in their full stream: being a photolith fac‐simile reprint of the Lyons edition by Bonhomme, 1551; and of titles, etc., of similar editions, 1548–1551, edited by H. Green (Manchester: A. Brothers for the Holbein Society, 1871), 6.

⁴⁰ W. Shakespeare, Sonnet 141, in K. Duncan‐Jones, Shakespeare's Sonnets (London: Cengage Learning, 2001), 397. For more on the relationship between contemporaneous ideas of the senses and Shakespeare's writing, see H. Dugan, ‘Shakespeare and the Five Senses’, Literature Compass, 6 (2009), 1–15.

⁴¹ The helpless frustration of unrequited love is a recurrent topic of Shakespeare's sonnets, but this is the only instance in which he addresses both the range of human sensory experience as a unified entity and each sense in succession in order to express his primary topic.

⁴² Hierarchies of the senses are far from consistent, but a long‐standing tradition, informed by Aristotle's Metaphysics, places sight well above the more ‘base’ sensations of touch, taste and smell. Furthermore, although terminological distinctions between the inner and outer senses vary as the taxonomies of both remain inconsistent well into the seventeenth century, broad distinctions reappear frequently in philosophical and medical literature from antiquity onwards. For instance, while Thomas Aquinas takes his four‐part enumeration of the internal senses from Averroes, Roger Bacon derives a five‐part list from Avicenna. See T. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pars I, Quaest. 78, Art. 4, No. 6 and Concl. R. Bacon, Opus Majus, Chapters 2–5. See H. A. Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophic Texts’, The Harvard Theological Review, 28: 2 (1935), 69–133, at 120, 123.

⁴³ See S. Kemp and G. J. O. Fletcher, ‘The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses’, The American Journal of Psychology, 106: 4 (1993), 559–76.

⁴⁴ S. Hawes, The Passetyme of Pleasure (London: W. de Worde, 1509), Chapter 24.

⁴⁵ We should note, also, that Willem II van Haecht's great uncle (also called Willem) was a star author of the Vieloren.

⁴⁶ C. Everaert, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert (Leyden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 387–408.

⁴⁷ ‘[…] den beste wyn, zonder helen, / die men dryncken mochte duer kelen […] ende alssic myn scuetel […] stelde onder myn nuese, / so ghevoeldic een roke.’ Everaert, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, 390.

⁴⁸ C. Steenbrugge, ‘Physical Sight and Spiritual Light in Three Sixteenth Century Plays of the Low Countries’, Marginalia, 3 (2006) (no page numbers).