The Allegory of the Sense of Smell

We present today's painting thanks to the National Museum in Wroclaw. Thank you! :)

The painting is part of a series of allegories of the five senses. Such female personifications were treated as a kind of a warning about the imperfections of the senses as deceiving tools of cognition and also about the snare of voluptuous women. The moralistic compositions were frequently courtly and decorative in their character. Their implicit eroticism completed the walls of private palace apartments. The disturbing mannerist contortion of the figures is a traditional type of expression in German painting, dating back to the works of Matthias Grünewald. The author of the series of allegories of the five senses was Johann Gleggler (sometimes written as Glöckler), a member of the Gleggler artistic family from Thuringia. Their notable workshop in Altenburg must have been damaged during the Thirty Years War. The unique and not very well-known author of the brilliant series probably emigrated during this period. He is sometimes identified with an artist of the same name working in Stuttgart and Coburg. An interesting fact is that he put his signature in the eye of the depicted woman—in the iris of the eye, to be precise.