The 17th-century Italian cardinal Federico Borromeo was so impressed with Jan Brueghel the Elder’s work that he once wrote to the artist, declaring he could smell spring itself in the minute petals and leaves that bloomed from the Flemish master’s brush.
Four hundred years later, those with less olfactory imaginations can head to the Prado in Madrid to fill their nostrils with the scents that suffuse Brueghel’s 1617-18 painting The Sense of Smell.
