While some museums are closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Apollo’s usual weekly pick of exhibitions will include shows at institutions that are currently open as well as digital projects providing virtual access to art and culture.
From fragrant perfumes and spices to the stink of sewage-filled canals, the 17th-century nose had much to contend with. Historic scents waft through galleries of Dutch Golden Age paintings at the Mauritshuis in this multi-sensory exhibition, which sniffs out the links between the olfactory and the pictorial; it will open as soon as coronavirus restrictions in the Netherlands allow (until 29 August). But in the meantime the museum has released a fragrance box, which you can have delivered to your home alongside a digital tour of the exhibition. (Perhaps warn whoever you live with before spraying the scent of ‘17th-century canal’ in your living room.) Find out more from the Mauritshuis’s website.
Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary here
The Mauritshuis’s fragrance box
Pomander (c. 1620), probably Northern Netherlands. Rijksmuseum Twenthe
View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds (c. 1670–75), Jacob van Ruisdael. Mauritshuis, The Hague
A Grocer’s Shop (1717), Willem van Mieris. Mauritshuis, the Hague
Source: Fleeting – Scents in Colour: virtual see-and-smell tour | Apollo Magazine
