Learn more about the artists, places, and themes in this exhibition.

The Five Senses: Sight

Patrons

A painting of Archduke Albert, dressed elegantly in black with a large white collar, seated in the foreground on the left, with a palace in the background.

Archduke Albert of Austria, Peter Paul Rubens, ca.1615. Oil on canvas, 113.5 cm x 177.5 cm. Prado Museum.

 

A painting of Archduchess Isabella, dressed elegantly in black with a large white collar, seated in the foreground on the right with a landscape and palace in the background.

The Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, Peter Paul Rubens, ca. 1615. Oil on canvas, 113 cm x 175.8 cm. Prado Museum.

This imagined scene composites many real things. In The Five Senses: Sight, the double portrait combines two existing individual canvases of the patrons, Archduke Albert and Isabella. Allegorical paintings and portraits commissioned by wealthy or royal people traditionally emphasized their high social standing with landscapes of their expansive domains. Here, for example, you see their palace of Coudenberg in Belgium.