2 days Ago
At the National Museum in Kraków, Leonardo da Vinci can now put a smell on you. The crisp musk of an old book. The sweet sting of a lover's perfume on a coat collar.
Smells accentuate our experiences and bond us to objects, their imagined memories seeped into our subconscious. But how far could our sense of smell take us when it comes to experiencing masterpieces? Could we, for example, truly feel like we were there as 'Lady with an Ermine' was first created? A team of researchers in Poland and Slovenia are attempting to find out, having developed a scented pen for Leonardo da Vinci's 15th century painting, which visitors of the National Museum in Kraków can now sniff as they gaze into the eyes of Cecilia Gallerani. “Institutions often perceive odors emitted from facilities as unnecessary information, and perhaps even as undesirable pollution.
However, from now on, visitors will be able to explore the smell of historic objects in a completely new and little-explored way. This project is truly groundbreaking," Elżbieta Zygier, Chief Conservator of the National Museum in Kraków, says. Developed through chemical analysis, the pen attempts to replicate how the object itself would have once smelt.
"We can feel the element of a walnut wood, because the walnut board was used as the base of the painting, and the smell of oil paintings," Tomasz Sawoszczuk, the project's lead researcher at Kraków University of Economics, says. "It's a very nice, historical museum smell," he.
