Sensational Experience in Early Modern Dutch and Flemish Art
Annual CNA Colloquium, Friday May 16, 2025 (hybrid)
Submission Deadline: March 21, 2025
The Center for Netherlandish Art (CNA) invites graduate students, PhD candidates, and recent post-doctoral scholars to explore the topic of sensation, intersensoriality, and beyond in Dutch and Flemish art and material culture from approximately 1560 to 1800.
Viewers past and present laud the stunning visual effects of Dutch and Flemish art but these artworks’ sensory effects (and affects) did not – and do not – stop at sight alone. Sensory experience created a bond between artwork and space for early modern individuals. Still life and kitchen scenes, for example, were often hung in the kitchen or keukenhuis. The smell of the breads, sweets, stews, and cheeses would have mingled in front of the piece creating a delectable exchange of sight and smell. The pungent smell of spices in kitchen cabinets and the sweetness of sugar on dining tables also hid a series of global entanglements that enabled their enjoyment in the first place. Meanwhile, objects such as pomanders were thought to promote good physical health, and signal another dimension beyond the external senses. The objects that composed the totality of early modern Dutch and Flemish material culture were thus imbued with the multiple connections between the five senses and beyond.
While the modern viewing experience often curtails our full perception of artworks, museums and institutions have begun reconstructing the multisensory engagement present during the early modern period. As one example, the 2021 exhibition at the Mauritshuis Fleeting Scents In Color utilized scent boxes to attune their viewer’s senses to the still lifes and landscapes on display. To what extent can modern research, scholarship, and museum practice grant access to the world of early modern multisensory experience? What other avenues have been unlocked with modern technology and how can they be implemented, responsibly, to expand experiences and understandings of early modern northern European art?
Topics might include but are not limited to:
● How do ‘representations’ provoke different embodied, cognitive and affective responses in the viewer? How do they depict the multiple interactions amongst and beyond the five senses?
● How do complex cultural artifacts, such as a spice box, coconut cup or silver pomander, incite viewers/users to sensation and action? How do they elicit experiences of pleasure—and disgust?
● How was sensory experience framed and conceived in the early modern period? How did cultural discourses and practices (scientific, economic, political, religious) shape early modern views about the senses? How did cultural artifacts shape these views in return?
● How did the senses connect to broader issues of one’s identity and physical and spiritual well-being in the early modern period?
● How do artworks and cultural objects relate to sensory experience, within the context of sensory impairment and disability (e.g. blindness, deafness, muteness)?
● What was the role of more-than-human sentience (e.g. plants, insects, animals, automata) in the making of art and cultural artifacts?
● What was the relationship between objects and their sensory environments (e.g. swamps and Kunstkammern, rural- and urbanscapes, nightscapes, oceanscapes)?
● How did artistic objects build different sensory orders, hierarchies and regimes? How did they act as sensory markers of distinction and exclusion (e.g. class, gender, race)? How did they frame sensation as a category of power (e.g. empires of sight, olfactory racism, colonial patterns of preference and consumption)?
● Could museums or other art institutions encourage or facilitate multisensory experiences?
The Colloquium seeks work that grapples with these questions, offering fresh, critical perspectives to the multisensory worlds of early modern Dutch and Flemish art.
Organized by CNA Pre-doctoral Research Fellows Jessica Sternbach and Laura Eliza Enríquez.
Two to three papers will be selected for presentation during the 2025 CNA Colloquium, scheduled for MAY 16, 2025. This event offers a platform for selected emerging scholars to share original research with the international community of experts in the field. The program will be held in a hybrid format, allowing for both in-person and virtual participation. Further details will be shared closer to the event date.
How to apply
We invite contributions from MA and PhD students, PhD candidates, and postdoctoral researchers (no more than 2 years post-degree). As we amplify our efforts toward becoming truly inclusive, ensuring that diversity and equity are lived values, we actively encourage candidates from all backgrounds and in any discipline that interacts closely with art or material culture.
Please submit a title and abstract (300 words maximum) and a CV in one PDF file to cna@mfa.org, with ‘Call for Papers’ included in the email’s subject line. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis through March 21, 2025. Selected participants will be notified by March 28, 2025. Selected candidates will have the opportunity to workshop their papers during a rehearsal presentation one week before the event.