Taste

Taste, one of a series representing the Five Senses, was painted by Frans Francken the Younger around 1700 on copper and is now in the Augustiner Museum in Freiburg. The Five Senses as an allegorical subject became enormously popular in Flemish and Dutch painting during the seventeenth century, offering artists the opportunity to display sensory experience through carefully chosen objects and activities: tasting through food and drink, hearing through music, sight through mirrors or optical instruments, touch through textures, smell through flowers or perfumes. Francken the Younger, whose career spanned from the late sixteenth century into the seventeenth, was among Antwerp's most prolific painters of cabinet-scale allegories and religious scenes. Copper as a support provided an exceptionally smooth surface for small-scale paintings, allowing extremely fine detail and a distinctive luminous quality that panel and canvas could not match. The Augustiner Museum's holdings of German and Flemish works document the cultural exchange along the Rhine corridor that connected Antwerp to southern Germany.

Copper panels were prepared with a reddish-brown or white ground and allowed the application of paint in extremely fine, controlled strokes impossible on textured supports. Francken used the copper's smoothness to render individual food items, vessel surfaces, and figure details with a precision that rewarded close examination. The support's non-absorbent nature allowed glazes to remain liquid longer, facilitating smooth transitions in flesh and fabric.