The Five Senses, Taste

The series of paintings illustrating the Five Senses reveals a clearly Baroque sensibility, evident in the artist’s capacity to capture the psychology of his sitters, the portrait’s realism resulting from the artist’s skill in capturing the spontaneity of a fleeting moment. Gonzales Coques painted two other series of paintings devoted to the five senses, of which one is currently in the National Gallery, London. In the series in the Brukenthal Art Gallery, the painter emphasizes the psychological states of his sitters, apparently common people, from the lower middle class. In this series, the attributes of the senses only serve as pretexts, to include in the composition a number of static elements (tables laden with food, musical notes, smoking paraphernalia, medical instruments, and an easel). The attribute of the fourth painting is a small stick, used in the epoch for sampling various substances. The mental state depicted in Taste is that of the analytical effort, preceding judgment. The unfocused eyes of the man are indicative of his effort to uncouple his other senses, in order to concentrate on the identification of similar test memories. ©Dana Roxana Hrib, European Art Gallery Guidebook, Second edition, Sibiu 2011.