The Five Senses

The Northern European pictorial tradition of representing the five senses has its origins in the sixteenth century. Initially, the emphasis in such works—sometimes realized as a series of prints or paintings, sometimes as a single composition—was a moralizing warning against excess. Active in the seventeenth century, Bijlert retained some elements of this iconographic precedent: the Venus-like figure holding a mirror references sight in the context of vanity, and the partially disrobed man opposite, who squeezes grapes into his mouth while spilling wine from a glass in his left hand, signifies the sense of taste in relation to overindulgence. A mysterious detail in this painting is the inverted mirror at the lower left, which most scholars presume to be a self-portrait.