Abstract

In The Art of Painting (Amsterdam 1707), the Dutch artist and writer Gérard de Lairesse (1641-1711) stated that the sense of taste “cannot be painted ; but may be in some measure expressed by occult significations.” During the early modern period, European subjectivities came in contact with “new” foods and flavours that they had not experienced before. In order to make these experiences intelligible, they embarked on a journey for visualising the invisible. This dissertation explores the multiple strategies adopted by Dutch artists and natural philosophers to visualise the sense of taste.

Drawing from the fields of sensory studies, and the interconnected histories of art and knowledge, this project aims at investigating the role of the sense of taste in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century Dutch art from a global perspective. It explores early modern ideas about taste and sense perception, and their role in art theory and scientific discourses on nature and the body. Modelling subjectivity and shaping society, the sense of taste was conceived within a larger project of nation-building and world-making.

Looking across a variety of visual genres and media, this dissertation proposes an iconography of the sense of taste that encompasses allegories of the five senses, still life, and scientific illustration. It looks at these images in light of an array of textual sources, including art theory, travel literature, natural philosophy, and culinary recipes. In order to do so, it considers three different case studies: Gérard de Lairesse’s views on still life and the five senses; the tongue in anatomical illustration; and, finally, the global history of the pineapple as the epitome of taste and the ineffable.