Allegory of Smell features a young man wearing a colorful, loosely-draped housecoat, who has fainted and is slumped in a chair. An extremely worried old woman wearing a fur-trimmed hooded mantle tries to revive him by holding a white handkerchief to his nose, presumably one containing smelling salts. An equally old man, his right hand covered by a white cloth, holds the youth’s bare right forearm and anxiously awaits to see if the woman’s efforts succeed. His colorful wardrobe, earring and gold chains, as well as the knives, scissors, razors and lotions displayed in a large wooden cupboard, identify him as a barber-surgeon, a profession renowned for its quacks. The position of the young man’s exposed forearm indicates that before the youth fainted, the quack was preparing to draw blood from one of the large veins in the patient’s arm, a practice called bloodletting.11 The quack would have used his white cloth to wipe up the blood after completing his procedure.

Patients being bled were generally portrayed with their lower arm exposed, exactly as in the image of another bloodletting (fig 8).12 Once pricked with a lancet (a two-edged surgical knife or blade with a sharp point), the blood would drip into a bowl often held by an assistant. Occasionally patients would faint at the end of a bloodletting, a condition deemed to indicate the treatment’s success. Here, however, one sees neither wound nor blood, neither bandage nor bowl, which means that the young man has not fainted in reaction to such a session, but in anticipation of it. Rembrandt’s image, indeed, not only mocks the elderly woman’s excessive concern about the patient’s condition and the quack’s profession, but also the young man’s lack of inner fortitude.

Each of the three panel paintings in Rembrandt’s series of Five Senses in The Leiden Collection feature three tightly-cropped figures who focus on a shared experience in a dark, undefined space. Rembrandt robed his figures in bright pink and light blue attire, which, lit by artificial light sources seen and unseen, provide splashes of color that greatly enliven the images. These surgeons, patients, and singers—young, old, male, female, crude and refined—are unforgettably expressive characters involved in activities that connect the senses of smell, touch and hearing in ways both humorous and empathetic.