Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice

Employing a wide range of approaches from various disciplines contributors to this volume explore the diverse ways in which European art and cultural practice from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries confronted interpreted represented and evoked the realm of the sensual. Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice investigates how the faculties of sight hearing touch taste and smell were made to perform in a range of guises in early modern cultural practice: as agents of indulgence and pleasure as bearers of information on material reality as mediators between the mind and the outer world and even as intercessors between humans and the divine. The volume examines not only aspects of the arts of painting and sculpture but also extends into other spheres: philosophy music and poetry gardens food relics and rituals. Collectively the essays gathered here form a survey of key debates and practices attached to the theme of the senses in Renaissance and Baroque art and cultural practice.