Watch-and-sniff video walk-through of Dutch art exhibition comes with the pungent aromas of 17th century living
- Fleeting – Scents in Colour uses aromas to enhance the viewing of 17th century Dutch masters – such as those from a church, a closet, and a stinking canal
- With the coronavirus pandemic having shut the exhibition, a video of the show with four scents to open as you watch it is available to viewers at home
The Hague’s Mauritshuis is a 17th-century palace full of world-famous paintings from the same period. The permanent collection includes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Fabritius’ The Goldfinch, both stars of bestselling novels and films.
The Covid-caused closure of the museum would have been disappointing at any time, but was particularly frustrating for curator Ariane van Suchtelen, who had spent years painstakingly preparing an extraordinary exhibition about aromas in art.
Fleeting – Scents in Colour is about the attempts of Dutch and Flemish painters to give an impression of smell in their paintings, about the odours of the people and places they portrayed, and about the powerful effect smells can have upon emotions and memory.
She had sought the assistance of historians, chemists and scent technologists to recreate complex and now long-forgotten odours ready to be puffed from foot-pedal-powered dispensers placed next to selected works, the smells of church, closet and canal adding an extra dimension to images already full of depth and detail.
So with the doors still closed and the clock ticking down to the point at which additional works loaned for the show would need to be returned, it was decided to create an opportunity not only to view the exhibition from any corner of the globe, but also to be able to smell it from there, too – a world first.
