Tag Archives: technical art history

Olfactory Notes: Integrating Embodied Research in Art History

By Madison Clyburn

In early modern Italy, perfumes were powerful substances whose therapeutic properties could generate pleasure and preserve or remedy one’s health if worn on or consumed by the body. In this post, I feature a typical Italian perfume recipe, “To make perfume for clothes,” from the Italian engraver and author Eustachio Celebrino’s (c. 1490-after 1535) printed vernacular pamphlet, Opera nova piacevole laqvale insegna di far varie compositioni odorifere per far bella ciaschuna donna…intitulata Venusta (Venice, 1550) intended for female consumers. Celebrino’s formulaic recipe books, typical of the genre, are printed records of socially important topics, like women’s health and adornment.

I made this recipe in Dr. Chriscinda Henry’s graduate seminar, Materiality and the Senses in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Art, at McGill University in the Winter of 2023. Celebrino’s recipe allowed us to work through experimental research methodologies in our final week dedicated to Embodied Knowing and Experimental Methods, which I co-led with fellow seminar member Mahdis Mohajeri. Making this perfume recipe raised questions about what it means for art historians living in one sensorium and studying others, like early modern Italy, where smelling amber rosary beads during prayer might bring one closer to God, chewing myrrh pastilles could prevent plague or wearing musk might help conceive a healthy child.

“To Make Perfume for Clothes”

The first step toward integrating embodied research in our art history seminar was to choose a recipe with accessible ingredients that was relatively quick to make. Celebrino’s perfumed sachet was just right since it simply asks one to take “fresh rose leaves & dry them in the shade & then take two carats [or vials] of musk, and make it into a powder, & two coins of fine cloves, and mix together, & then put it [all] in one or two little bags in the clothes.” 

Graduate student, Em Grisdale’s sachet keeps sweaters moth-free and smelling fresh one year later!

Before our seminar, I assembled a recipe kit with instructions and ingredients for each participant. I found cloves and dried roses from a local herbalist shop, while I substituted musk root for musk, whose extraction from the musk deer’s preputial gland is primarily illegal today. 

Next, I transcribed and translated the recipe, placing that information in a PowerPoint. This left more time in class to examine primary texts like Pliny’s The Natural History and Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s Commentaries (1565) to understand the varied classical and early modern uses of musk, roses, and cloves. At the same time, selections from Sven Dupré et al. Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment (2020) and Pamela Smith’s From Lived Experience to the Written Word (2022) grounded our entrance into an aromatic art history, offering insight into how hands-on historical recipe experiments can help make students more resourceful researchers and inform early modern health, hygiene, and beauty practices.

The final step consisted of interpreting the recipe through practice. Students opened their kits and began to crush, mix, and add the ingredients to a draw-string bag.

Some participants followed the recipe, and others adapted it; some used their hands, while others used a hammer or mortar and pestle to crush the musk root.

The recipe’s flexible ending tells one to put the sachet “in the clothes,” possibly in a chest, carried in a pocket, worn under a skirt or attached to a belt. Making the recipe together allowed us to pose questions, such as what types and materials of bags might be preferred, how much musk equals a carat or vial, and share reactions like musk stinks! 

Em Grisdale shows us how to wear Celebrino’s recipe on a belt loop.

Implications for Sensory Research in Art History

Embodied research welcomes questions about the sensuous relationships between the ephemeral body and its material culture. Things like perfumed sachets for clothes hinted at but not seen in visual media reveal how olfactory experiences in the early modern period are everywhere and nowhere. For example, middle- and upper-class women often had the luxury of owning multiple sets of clothes. When not worn, women stored their clothes in chests with sachets made from pure ingredients like musk or, for aspiring citizens, a counterfeit version made of spices and toasted breadcrumbs to preserve the fabrics’ quality and cleanliness. One can imagine only the finest ingredients perfuming Lambert Sustris’ Reclining Venus (c. 1548) in this wholesome atmosphere comprised of a downy mattress sprinkled with fragrant pink and white roses, sumptuous fabrics, and a woman playing a folding harpsichord, whose charming sounds vibrate through the clean air wafting through an open colonnade window.

Attributed to Lambert Sustris (c. 1515-20 -1584), Reclining Venusc. 1548, oil on canvas, 116 x 186 cm, Venice or Padua, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-3479. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

But of course, we cannot see the physical sachet made from Celebrino’s recipe that may lie nestled inside the elegant cassone (chest) in the background of Sustris’ painting. We cannot sniff notes of rose, musk, and clove possibly escaping the fibres of the pastel pink dress that a woman holds above the chest. Only by reconstructing these sachets can we begin to sense smell’s critical role in preserving hygienic bodies and homes as well as in observing or challenging socially constructed gender and class hierarchies in early modern Italy.

Detail of Sustris’ Reclining Venus showing a young woman leaning over an open-lidded cassone. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Embracing what we cannot see or smell through embodied research allows us to imagine how Celebrino’s recipe and Sustris’ painting document once fragrant interiors. An art historical approach to making recipes aims to recenter early modern sensuous practices and experiences in artworks so that teaching and academic scholarship can help us bridge two sensoria—that of our current moment and overlooked pasts.


Madison Clyburn is an Art History PhD candidate at McGill University. Her thesis focuses on the material culture of women’s wellness in late medieval and early modern Italy. Her research combines art and gender history, the history of medicine, material culture, and sensory studies to determine how perfumes were used to observe, challenge, and invert socially constructed gender and class hierarchies in the early modern period.

Call for Editors: Social Media and Acquisitions

The Recipes Project is looking for new editors to grow our readership and expand the range of scholarship we feature on the blog. Are you a savvy Tweeter who loves the back-and-forth exchange of social media? Are you a regular reader with ideas about what you’d like to see us feature on the blog? Do you love thinking about recipes in all their myriad forms? Then you might make a great social media or acquisitions editor, and we would love to hear from you!

Editorial duties include:

Social Media Editors

  • Amplifying, sharing, and promoting writing on recipes, especially by underrepresented groups 
  • Running our social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter)
  • Regular liaising with co-editors about site development, content, and promotion

Acquisitions Editors

  • Engaging with underrepresented groups and areas of study related to recipes, especially among underrepresented groups and non-Western societies
  • Connecting with and inviting potential contributors 
  • Organizing, editing, and uploading posts in rotation with other co-editors 
  • Regular liaising with co-editors about site development, content, and promotion 

About Us

The Recipes Project is an interdisciplinary, volunteer organization. This work is the unpaid product of a community of passionate scholars of recipes.

We welcome candidates from all backgrounds, including those engaged with the culinary arts, creative food writing, and academic research. We welcome scholars from a variety of disciplines: anthropology, comparative literature, classics, history, linguistics, literary criticism, sociology, and more. Graduate students are valued members of our community.  We particularly invite submissions from those from underrepresented groups and non-Western societies. 

The Recipes Project has an international reach that explores recipes of all kinds: medical, culinary, scientific, magical. Our posts cover a range of topics relating to historic cookbooks, instructions, ingredients, guidelines, and methods of cultivation and production across time and place. We value new writers and early career researchers, giving them a platform for new writing and supporting and amplifying their work. We have a broad audience—in 2021, we averaged 18,000 unique site visitors per month, and we have over 11.5K Twitter followers. We look forward to expanding further, with your help!

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To apply, please include a CV and one-page pitch describing what you wish to bring to the team. Acquisitions Editors: include two ideas for a month-long series and how you might expand our reach to new audiences. Social Media Editors: include two ideas for a week-long social media campaign that reaches distinct and diverse groups. Have other ideas? Send them our way! 

Please submit applications via email to recipesproject@brocku.ca. First review will begin on Feb. 1, 2022 and will continue until positions are filled.

Current Editorial Team

  • Clare Gordon Bettencourt
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Boiling hot oil: on the assessment of temperature in late medieval processing of linseed oil

By Indra Kneepkens

Indra Kneepkens is a technical art historian, specializing in the materials and techniques of late medieval panel painting. She is currently finalizing her dissertation, which is focused on the use of processed linseed oils and paint additives in the painting practice of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century.

Raw linseed – the basis for linseed oil

From art technological sources, such as recipes and manuals for the preparation of paints, and from the analysis of paint samples, we know that late medieval and early modern craftsmen heated oils for use as a binding medium in paints, as well as for the preparation of varnishes. As a technical art historian, I research and reconstruct these oils and varnishes, to be able to establish the effects they have on paints. My aim is to understand how the development and use of these materials influenced the painting process and the final appearance of art works. Unfortunately, 14th-  to 17th-century art technological sources that include heat-treatment of oil typically do not give absolute temperature indications. This is no surprise, because thermometers were developed in different stages between the late 16th and early 18th century. Therefore, craftsmen had to rely on their senses for the assessment of temperature.

Cennini’s handbook has been transcribed an translated repeatedly, most recently by Lara Broecke in 2015

That controlling temperature was important to late medieval craftsmen is illustrated by a remark in the Libro dell’arte (ca. 1390), that was written by the Italian painter Cennino Cennini. In his recipe for a heat-treated oil the writer almost personifies fire, warning us that it would willingly burn down the house if it got a chance to reach into the pan.[1] And indeed, it seems likely that the temperature of oil was sometimes raised pretty high, to the point where potentially explosive gasses form. So how did pre-thermometer craftsmen determine the temperature of their oils?

Even if not in absolute terms, early modern sources do contain clues about the kind of temperatures that were considered useful in oil processing. In most cases, oils were heated over fire, in ceramic, bronze or copper vessels. As wood or peat fires can easily reach temperatures over 500°C, and the vessels were able to withstand these, it was clearly possible to reach the auto-ignition point of linseed oil (ca. 343°C). Most likely, temperature would have varied from case to case, depending on factors like fuel type and the distance between the vessel and the heating source.[2]

Sometimes sources mention a strong reduction of the oil, or they describe the texture of the end result, comparing it to fluid honey for example. In varnish recipes a string-test reoccurs, in which a finger is dipped into, and then lifted from a cooled drop of the mixture of boiled oil and resins, to see if a thread is formed.[3]My own experiments have shown that to reach a sufficient thickening of an oil or varnish, and to dissolve most resins, the materials must be heated for quite some time and at a fairly high temperature. Finally, empirical tests that remind us of everyday cooking may have been used to keep an eye on the temperature of oils. In Arte de la Pintura (1649), Pacheco describes how bread, garlic and feathers were stuck in boiling oil; if they appeared browned or scorched, the cooking process was completed.[4]

During my experiments over the past few years, it has become evident that one can make a reasonably accurate temperature assessment based on how the oil behaves during heat-treatment. A swirling movement for example, was noticed in oils from a temperature of ca. 90°C, while repugnant fumes typically started to develop around 200°C.

Figure 1. Foam developing on oil heated in a ceramic vessel

I also realized that the development of foam, which is commonly mentioned in recipes, may have been a clear indication of temperature. But it is also closely related to the type of cooking vessel that was used. I did not see any foam until I exchanged my glass laboratory beakers for a glazed ceramic pot. Foam appeared when the oil reached a temperature of 100°C. It must have been caused by water evaporating from the clay body, as I had rinsed the vessel before use. Bubbles also formed when garlic and bread were boiled in oil, from ca. 61 and 80°C respectively, with a high point again around 100°C. Although the garlic started to darken earlier, both bread and garlic clearly browned around 180°C, and completely blackened between 230 and 240°C.

In another experiment thirteen feathers, of different size and from various birds, were dipped in hot linseed oil until they started to curl. Surprisingly, all feathers curled within a range of 27°C, between 237 and 264°C. These experiments not only support the relative accuracy of these empirical methods, but also indicates that temperatures of ca. 100 and 200-250°C were meaningful to early practitioners.

Figure 2. Raw linseed oil (far left) heated at 150 (1-4 hours, jars 2-5 from the left), 200 (8 hours, larger jar) and 300 degrees C (1-4 hours, jars 7-10 from the left).

In more systematic tests, linseed oil was heated to 150 and 300°C, for one, two, three, and four hours. Interestingly, the color and thickness of the oils that were heated at 150°C appeared more or less unaltered after the experiment. In tests where these oils were mixed into paints, they behaved very similar to raw linseed oil. At 300°C the oils thickened and darkened considerably. They affected paints in a very significant way, causing them to level, and making it possible to create smooth glossy films without any visible imprint of the brush. Paints with these oils were also less prone to yellowing. An oil that was heated at 200°C for eight hours however, still made paints level perfectly, but it also caused extreme yellowing.

So knowing how to assess temperature and balancing it over time must have been crucial skills for those who prepared heat-treated oils and varnishes. Experiments have shown that knowledgeable individuals would have been able to make a fairly accurate assessment of temperature, using their senses. They could note changes in the appearance and behavior of oil and indicator materials, and manually test its viscosity. Although there are several indications that temperatures of 200°C and higher were preferred, it makes sense that craftspeople would adapt the temperature to the materials at hand and the desired end result. The lack of unambiguous temperature indications in oil processing recipes reflects this adaptive use of temperature and a reliance on the senses that was expected of craftspeople before the invention of thermometers.

[1]Broecke, Lara. Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’ Arte: A new English translation and commentary with Italian transcription.London: Archetype, 2015, 127, chapter 91.

[2]Aldeias, Vera, Harold L. Dibble, Dennis Sandgathe , Paul Goldberg, and Shannon J.P. McPherron . “ How heat alters underlying deposits and implications for archaeological fire features: A controlled experiment” Journal of Archaeological Science67 (2016): 66.

[3]Broecke 2015, 127. Neven, Sylvie. The Strasbourg Manuscript. A Medieval Tradition of Artists’ Recipe Collections (1400-1570). London: Archetype, 2016: 132-135, no. 92-94.