Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850–1914 by Christina Bradstreet

How can a smell be pictorially conveyed?Historically, western art has devised means to represent invisible things, like winds puffing across painted skies, or wholly immaterial essences such as divine spirits in the form of golden discs and shooting lines.Mostly, smells-whether sweet, stinky, sharp, or smokyare conveyed through associated images signaling the viewer's response "in real life," as we say.The dominant image in Christina Bradstreet's survey of late nineteenth-century European art is of a rose and a nose belonging to a pretty girl.This comes close to collapsing idea and referent, both being offered for sensory pleasure without the cruder message of women as pluckably consumable, as in so much art of the era.