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the texts we want students to read and underpins them with explanatory 
material that is adequate to the circumstance.

laura willett, Victoria College, University of Toronto

Quiviger, François. 
The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art. 
London: Reaktion Books, 2010. Distributed by University of Chicago Press. Pp. 
206. ISBN 978-1-86189-657-5 (hardcover) $27.

Synesthesia, a neurological condition in which two or more senses are 
connected — leading to hearing in colour or tasting shapes or countless other 
anomalies of sensation  —  first entered the medical literature in the early 
nineteenth century and then virtually disappeared from about 1930 until the 
1990s. It has since enjoyed a sustained renaissance, particularly in research 
related to neuroplasticities, which ground sensory and aesthetic perceptions in 
neurological responses. The early nineteenth century also gave birth to Stendhal 
syndrome, a psychosomatic illness brought on by a surfeit of beautiful art, 
usually, at least at the time, in Florence. The fact that both of these conditions 
of heightened and overwhelming aesthetic sensory overload became matters 
of medical concern in the early nineteenth century, before the radical shift to 
modernisms that vanquished visual “beauty” in favour of expressive “isms,” 
might well have been a result of sustained sensory excitement that had gripped 
art since the Renaissance. 

Basing his ideas on both modern neurological discoveries (although these 
are mentioned only as asides and are never intrusive in the text), Quiviger is able 
to state unequivocally that “representations of sensory experience do stimulate 
the same region of the brain reacting when the real sensation occurs” (p. 167). 
In Quiviger’s analysis, Renaissance art  —  particularly Renaissance paintings 
and sculptures — deliberately triggered viewers to imagine sensations. The key 
examples he returns to, with great effect, are nativity scenes (of Christ, the Baptist, 
the Virgin Mary) in which the foreground is often dominated by the figure of 
a nurse or midwife who tests the warm temperature of the soapy bathwater, 
placed directly in our line of vision, while holding the “damp animate body of 



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the newborn child” (p. 167). The image signals a flood of responsive sensations 
in the viewer; of touch, smell, warmth, and damp. Audiences “feel” the warmth 
and humanity of that tiny, sacred figure, just as we “hear” the notes struck by 
figures who tune instruments in concert scenes, and angels who tune lutes in 
sacra conversazione scenes  —  we “feel” so that we might sense the humanity 
of Christ, we “hear” so that we might tune in to the silent message of the holy 
conversation. In feeling and hearing, as well as in our olfactory responses 
to signs of “smell” (flowers, fruits and other foods  —  which also awake our 
sensations of taste), we more fully enter the world of the image, which we gauge 
not only visually but through all of our connected sensations. The importance 
of this, for Quiviger, is that these sensational responses work as effectively as 
the visual construct of linear perspective to construct and imagine space in the 
mind of the viewer: “representing sound forces the mind to imagine the space 
without which sound cannot exist” (p. 151).

The importance of the book is almost lost in its deceptive and stark 
simplicity; Quiviger’s aim is to explore “the place and function of non-visual 
sensations in the imagination and art of the Italian Renaissance” (p. 7). To do this 
he describes the importance of sensation in medieval religion; the functioning 
and faculty of memory, imagination, and visualization in Renaissance thought; 
how the multi-sensory imagination forged through these practices influenced 
artistic practice and the audience reception of visual objects; the relationships 
between iconography and the sensory imagination found in emblem art; and, 
finally, the author reads an astonishing variety of Renaissance works to forge an 
iconography of “non-visual sensory data in Renaissance art” (10). The result, 
like Stendhal syndrome, is slightly overwhelming but there is much pleasure 
to be derived from it. One wishes only for a slightly more ample bibliography, 
particularly with reference to the recent neurological research into aesthetic 
reception.

sally hickson, University of Guelph