Franz Cleyn. Smell (Odor).

A long, narrow strip

The sheet is less than 10 cm tall and 20 cm wide. The image is engraved as a horizontal band, like a frieze. At the centre, in a small cartouche at the top edge, is the word ODOR, Latin for smell.

Below it, a woman sits on a stone plinth. She wears a wreath of flowers. A basket of flowers rests in her lap. She lifts a blossom close to her face. Around her, an arch of flowers curves up like a garden gate. A dog lies close to the base.

On either side is another world. Foliage curls into large spirals, ribbons wind, winged children fly, stand and climb. On the right, two of them reach up towards a vase full of flowers set on top of an ornamental column.

Flowers in the centre, flowers on her head, flowers in the basket, flowers in the vase. The Met records roses in the image. If this sense must be told through one object, Cleyn chooses flowers, and chooses a great many.

Grottesche, an Italian way of decorating

Quinque Sensuum is a set of a title plate and five sheets, each sense a female figure. The title plate names the manner used: the senses are described in the kind of painting the Italians call grottesche.

Grottesche takes its cue from ancient Roman wall paintings found in Rome in the late fifteenth century, in buried rooms that people then called grottoes, grotte. It is a world of scrolling leaves, hybrid creatures, vases and hanging garlands. No logic required, no gravity either.

In this manner the frame matters as much as the picture. Cleyn places his allegory of smell inside a grottesche frame, and fills that frame with things that smell. It does not simply surround the subject. It stretches the subject out to both sides.

The dog at her feet is a familiar detail. In many European allegories the dog accompanies smell because of its nose. Here it lies still, almost absorbed into the ornament.

A tapestry designer for the king

Franz Cleyn was born in Rostock, in northern Germany, in 1582 and died in London in 1658. Most of his career was tied to England, to the Mortlake tapestry manufactory near London.

At Mortlake, Cleyn designed tapestries and the borders that framed their scenes. He also designed a Five Senses set of tapestries for Charles I.

That training shows in Quinque Sensuum. A large tapestry often has a central scene and a deep border full of flowers, leaves, birds and animals. Cleyn's little strip of paper works the same way, like a tapestry border shrunk to the size of a hand.

The Met's impression carries the name of the publisher Robert Walton and is dated about 1655, a few years before Cleyn's death. Prints then passed through many hands: designer, engraver, printer, seller. A good set of images could outlive the person who drew it.

One sense in a crowd

The five senses were a common subject in European painting and prints of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Smell was usually recognised by a few fixed objects: flowers, a vase, a dog. Scent in painting of that era was rich enough for the Mauritshuis to build a whole exhibition around it, Fleeting: Scents in Colour.

Cleyn uses those same objects but sets them in a different structure. His main figure does not stand alone in a scene. She is surrounded by ornament, by children busy with their own affairs, by a vase of flowers far off that she never looks at.

Look long enough and the question turns around. Not what the woman is smelling, but where the smell on this sheet begins. In the flower in her hand, in the vase on the right, or in the whole band of foliage running across the page?