A READING: REPRESENTATION OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS DRAWING OF FIVE SENSES
MÜZİK ALETLERİNİN TEMSİLİ ÜZERİNE BİR OKUMA BEŞ DUYU RESİMLERİ

Author : Burcu Günay KAYGUSUZ
Number of pages : 166-179

Abstract

Drawings of the five senses that appeared at the beginning of the 17th century when the early modernity shaped the society and the art constitute the main axis of this study. In this period, a humanist and scientific interest was inspired for the five senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste) that define the human being. The topic of the five senses was transformed into the focus point of visual arts in addition to its position in anatomy, medicine, philosophy and sociology. In terms of humanist and philosophot@hical aspects, the five senses that are the building blocks of the human identity gained a new meaning in art of drawing as the reflection of traditional religious beliefs. In his book titled “Art and the Committed Eye”, Richard Leppert interprets the drawings on the five senses as the forms that become meaningful when they are thought in terms of the afterlife and mentions an alphabet of images that exist in holy books. How the five senses are represented in the holy books is represented in the following manner: “sight as represented with the Eagle is related to Jesus’ miracle of healing a man born blind and the mirror is related to Adam and Eve who were expelled from Eden; hearing is represented with the sermon of John the Baptist; taste is represented with the miracle of the Feeding of the 5,000; smell is represented with Mary Magdalena who anointed Jesus' feet with nard; and touch is related to the Jesus’ miracle of walking on water”. Jan Brueghel the Elder with Flemish descent is the leading artist who embraced the five senses in his drawings in the 17th century. There are approaches in the artist’s drawings that addressed each of the senses separately. His drawing titled “the Sense of Hearing”, completed in the years 1617-1618 is composed of various cultural instruments that serve earthly pleasures and the nude body of a female. The musical instruments in the drawing with leading roles appear side by side with the female and therefore the desires of hearing and sight stimulate the viewer at the same time. These types of drawings “actually” serve the “action of sight” or in other words, they are the ears of the eyes. In this context, the “hearing” theme included in the drawings related to the five senses should be understood with the dimensions of representation especially in 17th Century European Drawing. The images create not the real world, but other worlds, other dimensions of perception. What is shown is not a mere musical instrument but its representation. In this framework, whether it is a drawing, a video or a photograph, everything is formed by images which open their doors to human conscience. Since, undoubtedly, human conscience is shaped by the inseparable parts of culture and history, all these works are the representations that are built by assigning a specific meaning to a specific socio-cultural strata.

Keywords

representation, practice, drawings of the five senses, Jan Brueghel

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