Contemporary visual semiotics has not missed the opportunity to question whether images can convey significations belonging to other senses than sight, such as tactile and sensory-motor presentations. Smell has been focused on less frequently because of the difficulty of presenting it as an image, or of producing it along with an image. Nonetheless, this is the area Maria Giulia Dondero explored in her recent research. First she presented her analysis of the representation of the power of perfume and the function of olfactory sensation in modern religious painting. She then examined the effects produced by actual fragrances that are embedded in contemporary advertisements.

In 2009, Maria Giulia Dondero, a senior researcher at the Foundation for Scientific Research (FNRS) working for the Service for Sciences of Language and Rhetoric of the University of Liège, published Le sacré dans l'image photographique. Etudes sémiotiques (Paris, Hermès Lavoisier), which was met with considerable interest. She has continued in this vein with an investigation of “The religious and the sacred, as seen in the iconography of the olfactory.” (1).

In an attempt to understand how the plastic representations in an image may signify odours or the scents of perfume, she chose the painting The Assumption of the Virgin (1630-1632) by Nicolas Poussin as the first subject of her analysis. For her next subject (not including her studies of the artistic photographs of Olivier Richon entitled “Madeleine en extase” and “Madeleine pénitente”, which had already drawn the attention of the author in the abovementioned work), she attempted to decode three print advertisements: Hypnotic Poison (Dior, 1999), Opium (Yves Saint-Laurent, 1988) and Opium (Yves Saint-Laurent, 1989).  This examination of representations of the olfactory from the 17th century to the contemporary period shows that, despite the progressive reduction in the importance of religion in art over several centuries, the sacred is far from having disappeared, although the mode of its representation has changed.

Perfume in religious painting

First, let’s consider the painting by Poussin. We see the body of the Virgin, three days after her death, being taken up into Heaven, caught up in a movement of ascension that is accentuated by the draped cloth in movement that enfolds Mary, who is being borne upward by a group of cherubic putti (angels). This group is further intertwined in a group of twisting clouds. At Mary’s feet we see the white shroud in which she had been wrapped, and a tomb around which still other putti fly, scattering on the ground the petals of the white roses they hold in their hands. The flowers have thus lost their singularity as objects. But the scattering of the petals is what permits the perfume of the roses to be emitted into the air: according to Maria Giulia Dondero, what we are seeing is “an action of opening and of placing something in circulation”. This is not a horizontal circulation, because the perfume, the scent given off by the roses, rises into the air, through the agency of the shroud, up into the clouds that frame the upper portion of the painting, partially obscuring the upper part of the columns that lend depth to the scene. We are in a world of impalpability, of lightness, of “inconsistent consistency”, of that which is the property of holy bodies that do not have to be touched to be perceived as holy. True faith does not involve verification.

In the manner in which an ascending movement draws a visitor’s gaze upward toward the spire of a Gothic cathedral – God is light – the observer-spectator of the 1630-32 Assumption by Poussin feels enveloped by a phenomenon that transcends us. The movement by which the Madonna is taken up into Heaven is shared by the viewer of the painting, thanks to the diffusion of the perfume of the roses in concentric circles, in floating somersaults and circular vortices. As a result of all this indicated movement, the boundary between the space of the painting and the space of the viewer is erased. To a narrative of a didactic nature concerning an event that is part of the Christian religious tradition, there is joined a sort of statement that raises the specific problem of the diffusion of the odour of holiness. Thus the relation that exists between the religious question of faith and the sacred dimension of the propagation of transcendence is invoked. And in this case, the painting under examination emits an odour that puts the question to the viewer “from within himself,” as Maria Giulia Dondero expresses it.

(1) Text appearing in the journal Questions de communication, n° 23, “Figures du sacré”, Boutaud and Dufour (dir.), June 2013. Otherwise, in a work directed by Philippe Brenot in collaboration with the “Musée de la Parfumerie” of Grasse, Le Parfum et l'amour (Paris, L'Esprit du temps, 2013), she has recently published a chapter entitled “Le parfum dans les iconographies religieuse et publicitaire”.