Making Sense of the Senses

Cluny Museum tapestries: taste

 

During their recent trip to Paris, my spouse and our elder son Richard dropped by the Cluny Museum, housed in one of the city’s most ancient buildings, and featuring one of the world’s greatest collections of medieval European art.  Joan brought back a set of postcards of one of the museum’s renowned holdings: the series of six spectacular tapestries depicting “The Lady with the Unicorn” (La dame à la lincorne).  You are probably aware of them, or of a somewhat similar set in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  I have often stood in awed admiration before the originals.  Now a couple of postcards are enough to set the mind racing.

 

wheel of the senses (14th c.) Peterborough, Cambridgeshire
 

            The principal achievement of the maker(s) of these amazing objects was to give birth to new beauty in the world, but the tapestries  do have an intellectual and scientific theme: five of them exemplify the five corporal senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste).  The sixth, in which the Lady does not seem to be “sensing” anything in particular, has puzzled scholars; but there is a clue to its probable “meaning” in an earlier mural painting discovered almost by accident in Longthorpe Tower, part of a late medieval domestic compound in Peterborough  in East Anglia.  The survival of medieval mural paintings in domestic buildings is comparatively rare.  One of the most interesting of the Longthorpe murals is a wheel of the five senses, in which each of the senses is allegorically represented by an animal: monkey (taste), spider (touch), boar (hearing), smell (vulture), and sight (rooster?).  These correspond to lore textually preserved in The Nature of Things (De natura rerum), the popular encyclopedia of Thomas of Cantimpré, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar.  In that work, however, the emblem for sight is a lynx or an eagle.  The Longthorpe “rooster” is unfortunately in the only seriously damaged section of the painting.

 

Earlier attitudes toward the bodily senses were complex.  In their brilliant exuberance, the Unicorn tapestries present beautiful and affirmative ideas that seem very different from the gloomy moral attitudes of medieval Christian asceticism, which regarded the pleasures of the senses with the deepest suspicion and sometimes with horror.  Medieval saints’ lives are replete with examples of the perverse warfare holy people waged against the gratification of sense.  They sprinkled ashes on their food, hardly “gourmet” to begin with, to render it a penance.  They wore hair shirts, cultivated body lice, slept on sharp gravels near the stench of orchestrated ordures.  Women went to heroic lengths to mar and conceal their beauty.  Origen castrated himself.  The modern mind recoils.  Learned men explained the story of Ulysses’ survival of the Sirens’ song, bound to the ship’s mast with wax-blocked ears, as a prefiguration of the crucifixion of Jesus, whose sacrificial death was also a triumph over sensual gratification.

                                   

 

wheel of the seven deadly sins

  

The elder Jan Breughel, collaborating with Rubens, did a famous series on the senses.  Four of the five individual panels of a set by Jan junior survive.  They are thematically related to the well-known Bosch “wheel” of the Deadly Sins.  The wheel itself was probably suggested by the very common medieval image of Fortune’s Wheel from Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, where the figure standing by the wheel—usually Fortune herself—is sometimes Lady Philosophy and sometimes the author Boethius.  (I suggest that the standing supervisory male monarch at Longthorpe reflects this version of the image; the “lady” in the Cluny tapestries may echo some female allegorical authority figure like Lady Philosophy.)

                                     

wheel of Fortune

   

All of this is of particular interest to me because I have long had in my sights a learned Elizabethan poetic mini-epic, or epyllion, by George Chapman—the same Chapman whose translations of Homer so fired the imagination of John Keats.  Chapman’s poem, which nobody has claimed to understand entirely, is entitled “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense.”  On the surface this is a fantastical bit of erudite pornography in which a fictional version of the poet Ovid becomes a voyeur who sneaks into a private garden where the beautiful young Corinna is bathing.  His exquisite lust for her is elaborated in more than a thousand lines of exquisite verse.

 

The identification of the five senses is ancient, and so is the moral or philosophical analysis of their operations.  Though it to some extent continued Greek philosophical traditions, Christian theology, with its deep hostility to sexual pleasure in particular, insisted on the dangerously misleading nature of all bodily gratifications.  In this regard, strange to say, the Roman erotic poet played a major pedagogic role, for though popularly regarded as a randy writer, he actually treated sexual passion as a madness and a disease.  His lines are frequently cited in medical and moral writings.  This surprising reputation is encouraged by his authorship of a poem called the Remedia Amoris (Medicines Against Love), a kind of palinode to his Art of Love.  But his epic Metamorphoses is likewise a huge catalogue of erotic disasters and sexual crimes in which the gods of Olympus are often the worst offenders.  The genre of the Latin elegy (overwhelmingly love poetry, often light-hearted) conventionally treated the sexual act as a five-stage process (seen from the male point of view).  The five steps of love (gradus amoris) were seeing the woman (visus), some friendly pick-up lines (adloquium), osculum (kiss), tactus (touch), and finally concubitus or factum (copulation).  This quite artificial scheme appears widely in Latin elegy, and then later in many medieval and Renaissance poems and plays.

 

            Ideas are often born of mixed marriages.  It takes only a little vigorous mental shoehorning—regard a kiss as a taste rather than a touch, concentrate on the auditory part of the spoken word, and punt on smell, of which there is a good deal in Chapman’s poem—and you have a reasonably tidy correspondence of the five senses and the quinque gradus amoris, the five steps of love.  That is the sequence of “Ovid’s” experience in Chapman’s poem.  You are hardly likely to lose the sequential plot of the poem’s progression according to the “steps of love”; but the printer of Chapman’s first edition (1595) makes sure you get the five senses part as well.  In the right margin of the “Argument” (brief synopsis) preceding the poem the senses are listed in order of narrative appearance: auditus, olfactus, visus, gustus, and tactus—hearing, smell, sight , taste, and touch.

 

            The “steps of love” had already become the steps of lechery in medieval moral theology.  Chaucer’s Good Parson, in the nearly endless sermon on penance that concludes the unfinished Canterbury Tales, calls the five-step program the devil’s five fingers.  “The firste finger is the fool lookynge of the fool woman and of the fool man.”  Chapman, a deeply scholarly man of the Renaissance, is both more learned and more subtle than a simple medieval parson, of course, and no one has yet explained to my satisfaction the ambiguities of his poem.  But once again we have the printer to help us.  He has put a rare Renaissance emblem or allegorical picture on Chapman’s title page.  Its motto[Mens] sibi conscia recti (“A mind conscious of its rectitude” from the Æneid 1, 604) does not take us too far.  But the picture itself speaks.  Old philosophers in the Platonic tradition, followed later by the Christian moralists, were deeply skeptical concerning the powers of the human sensory apparatus to deliver truth, which belonged to the world of the spirit, not that of the body.  “We see as through a glass, darkly,” wrote St. Paul.  The sensory world is replete with misleading distortions.  An example often used was the palpable distortion of objects viewed through water.  A straight oar seemed to bend at the junction of its submersion.  That is the principle demonstrated in the rather crude title page emblem.  A straight piling or signal post rising from the sea-bed appears to bend at the water’s surface.  The word rectitude derives from a Latin word meaning straightness, uprightness.  Sibi conscia recti. The mind, in the rectitude of which it is conscious, must not surrender to the distortions of mere corporal sense.