The incense offering

Can I write about something that passes by me largely unnoticed – like a sky of clouds over a windowless room? I do not believe I am exaggerating when I say that scent plays a minor role in my life. Or am I not paying enough attention to it?

Smell dominated my nightmares in my childhood. As a child of six, seven, I knew in my dreams by an overpowering and pervasive smell that everything was over. I saw nothing in these dreams, I only smelled death.

Is recognizing a smell hereditary? And if not, how is it possible that I made up corpse smells as a child? I could rúík death in my dreams – which suggests that in the waking state I do much less with my sense of smell than is possible, than I have in me.

The stench in my dream was all-encompassing. I knew that was the smell of corpses. I didn’t need images to accompany it. But upon awakening, I could not tell what I had actually dreamt. There was and there is no image, no story to hang my impressions on.

Am I smell-blind? Smell mute? Smell deaf?

Would Caro Verbeek (b. 1980) know good words to describe scents? I met with her at the Rijksmuseum, where she will tell me about the cultural-historical value of scent. Verbeek is an art and scent historian. She is doing doctoral research at the VU, in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum and the IFF (International Flavors & Fragrances Inc., one of the largest producers of fragrances and flavorings in the world), on reconstruction of bygone heritage. Verbeek: “It is shocking how the role of scent in art history has gone unnoticed for centuries. For example, there is no methodology among restorers of art to reconstruct scents, let alone preserve them.’

There are – more by accident than by intention – exceptions. Verbeek points me to the exceptional Collectors’ Cabinet with Miniature Pharmacy (anonymous, 1730), which is in the Rijksmuseum. The museum describes the showpiece as a storage cabinet of medicinal ingredients. ‘Several drawers are also filled with minerals, fossils, wood samples, seeds and the like; many others are empty,’ reads the Rijksmuseum’s site. Verbeek calls it a fragrance cabinet: ‘It is a miniature of an apothecary’s cabinet full of fragrant resins, base notes for perfume. Apothecaries made perfumes in the past and medicinal properties were added to them. The resins have kept their scent – still perceptible to the nose – all these centuries that they were stored.’

Unfortunately, the opulent cabinet in the museum is only meant to be looked at: visitors are not allowed to open drawers to smell the contents.

A clean soul

Verbeek explains that the way scents have been depicted in paintings has been largely ignored in our historiography: ‘Scents are often invisible. You have to know the stories and perceive them in an olfactory way. Usually paintings are reproduced with photographs and descriptions in text. Even works in which smell is a key moment have been treated mainly as visual information, ignoring essential features, a situation that is slowly changing.’

As an example, Verbeek shows me the painting The Adoration of the Magi by the Haarlem painter Geertgen tot Sint Jans (circa 1465-circa 1495), which hangs further down in the Rijksmuseum. ‘Whatever you look up about this painting, wherever you look, almost everything is about the visual information the canvas depicts,’ says Verbeek.

‘I too would be inclined to rely on what I see when describing this canvas. For example, my eye catches the unusual shoe that emerges under Joseph’s brown robe. On the outside of the foot is a kind of side wing of a shoe, with a remarkably aerodynamic sole, which would not be out of place under a trainer.

On Statenvertaling online – Bible and art, it reads: ‘Some of the figures in the foreground are not particularly excellently worked out. Jesus looks more like a doll than a baby, Mary has an egg-head and looks somewhat drowsy ahead, and poor Africa has been made completely black by Geertgen. The white men come off better; perhaps Geertgen could only have had such models at his disposal.’

The doll-like Jesus, Mary’s egghead, the overly black king: indeed, these are all visual approximations. Nowhere is the key moment of this painting described, namely the gift of the three Wise Men from the East.

The Statenbijbel says in the Gospel of Matthew: ‘And coming into the house, they found the child with Mary his mother, and descending, they worshiped the same; and having opened their treasures, they brought him gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh.’ Verbeek: ‘According to tradition, the gift consisted of gold, frankincense and myrrh. But what is much more plausible from my research is that the three Wise Men brought a incense offering to Christ. The gold would then not have consisted of metal, but of a golden, fragrant resin.

The gifts of golden resin, frankincense and myrrh were a distinct aromatic symbol of recognising Jesus as king and god. Until at least the sixth century, “bitter myrrh” (“myrrh” literally means “bitter”) was believed to have prophetic value. The gift was seen as prophetic of Christ’s future suffering. The sweet incense was an equivalent for holiness. Saints who smelt sweet of themselves were thought to be in the ‘fragrance of holiness; the highest sign of god, of a pure soul.’

The incense sacrifice was precious and associated with high status. Only gods, emperors and pharaohs were offered resin by fumum (through smoke) as an offering. Mortals were not allowed to come into contact with it. ‘The incense offering,’ says Verbeek, ‘has a long history, which can be traced back to incense offerings from ancient Egypt.’

Searching the internet for more information on incense offerings from ancient Egypt, I landed on the website of Derqx, a perfume brand unknown to me that gives a nice, concise history of human intercourse with scent. How essential that intercourse is is illustrated by a picture of a young woman, with blowing hair, within kissing distance of an immaculate young man, with a carefully ruffled hairdo. The message is clear: those who smell good are attractive partners. Smell is presented here as a bridge to love, a bridge to the higher.

I read that the Egyptians not only offered their scents to gods: ‘Especially high-ranking women exerted influence and powers of attraction through scents in pastes and ointments.’

The incense offering still has a role in contemporary society: many people buy perfume on birthdays or at Christmas as a gift for a loved one or someone close to them. Giving perfume is seen as an intimate gift: you can’t just give it to anyone.

Celebrities like to come out with their own fragrance, playing on the idea that this is an intimate gesture. For instance, Christina Aguilera, David Beckham and Justin Bieber have released their own fragrance line. One of Bieber’s perfumes is called The Key (2013). Anyone wanting to get in touch with the idol need only splash themselves with his scented water. If the advertising campaign is to be believed, Bieber chose the bottle with the key motif for its symbolic meaning. He wanted his fans to know that they should always believe in their dreams, and his perfume offers the key to that end. So, in a sense, Bieber is offering his fans a propitiatory offering: the fragrance offers access to the unachievable, the divine, access to himself, in this case.

Explosive scents

Verbeek tells me about a spectacular example of a reukoffer from the 1920s. Fedele Azari (1895-1930), an Italian pilot and futurist, in his manifesto Teatro aereo futurista, proposed bombing cities with explosives made of coloured, aromatic powders.

The idea of fragrance as a weapon may have been picked up by the designer duo Viktor & Rolf, who launched their first perfume Flowerbomb in 2005, in a bottle shaped like a hand grenade. In a 2015 interview with The Telegraph, they talk about their first perfume, which the newspaper mentions that a bottle goes over the counter every three minutes in the UK: ‘We like the paradox in the name Flowerbomb. Two extremes brought together to create something new.’

Just as Viktor & Rolf created a strong name to address the power of scent, poets who were at the forefront of futurism coined terms to describe fragrances and scent concepts under the heading parole in libertà, words in freedom. Among other things, they coined disprofumo for complementary fragrances, monodorita for a monotonous fragrance landscape and narrativo olfattivo for a fragrance story. These words show that it is indeed possible to find new formulations for fragrances. The words give a body to what would otherwise dissipate. I wonder how futurists would have described the smell of death. For them, it was the non-intellectual – because undescribed – aura of smell that made it so attractive to work with. The Italian futurists, who were anti-intellectual and anti-bourgeois, at the beginning of the last century found in smell a perfect attribute for making democratic art that required no prior knowledge. For example, with the stench of sulfuric acid, they could depict the physical repugnance of what took place on the battlefields of war, both with words and senses. They reportedly spread the smell of garlic, onion and rotting meat at presentations of their artworks and poetry readings. “These smell-happenings are only described, the smells themselves have faded,” Verbeek tells me as we walk across Museum Square to the Stedelijk Museum – underscoring the importance of her research. We will look at and smell one of her favorite works of art: The Beanery (1965) by Kienholz. Verbeek, like me, has known this work since childhood.

We walk into the recreated bar, where everything is just a fraction more compact than in reality. The bar, the stools, the ashtrays, the space, the people; everything is of a condensed, intense quality. I feel like I can take a seat at the bar. That I can merge with this environment. That I never have to leave – which both reassures and oppresses me.

Edward Kienholz (1927-1994) based this work on his regular bar on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. One of the most penetrating sensations this work offers is a smell. For this, Kienholz created a special scent recipe using beer, rancid grease, urine, mothballs and cigarette ash.

As soon as we stand in front of the bar and I soak up the smell of cigarettes and piss, I am seven years old again, and I stand open-mouthed looking at clock heads. Of course a head could be a clock, my seven-year-old head thinks, and I quickly feel for hands where I first suspected my nose, my eyes.

“Do you smell it?” shakes Verbeek out of my odor-induced daydream. She sniffs the musty air of Kienholz. ‘He used his own urine to make the bar smell as authentic as possible. Now that has been replaced by ammonia. More hygienic, yes, but not the way Kienholz intended.’ Verbeek smiles.

How a baby smells

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‘You can’t convey a smell in either a painting, a photograph or a text,’ says Verbeek. ‘That is precisely why research into smell itself – which we can indeed reproduce – and research into the cultural-historical value of smell is so important.’

Scents themselves have no words, no face. But when we smell myrrh, frankincense and some other resinous substance, we need no words, no image. We smell not a representation, but the sacrifice made two thousand years ago by the Magi from the East.

I ask Verbeek if she has ever heard of people who drink from smells. Of people who dream of the smell of corpses, for example.

Verbeek: ‘Death smell is one of the few odors we have an innate aversion to. Other smells – excrement, urine, sweat – we have learned to find foul. She continues: “Smell is very important in dreams in other cultures, like the Desana Indians, who divide their universe into smells. They have words for that, too. During sleep, they put fragrances under the pillow and they believe that the soul and spirits manifest as scents. I myself dreamt once that someone asked me if I wanted to smell the most wonderful fragrance on earth. When I said “yes,” that person reached out to hand me a baby. I remember being surprised and smelling the baby, but I don’t remember the smell itself. I wouldn’t be able to describe it anymore.’

The smell of baby and the smell of death come together in our conversation. The smell of the beginning and the smell of the end meet. We have yet to find the right words to describe them.