Editorial note: This text will be published in two parts. The present publication corresponds to the first part; the second will be made available in the next blog update. 

Although we have the clear impression that the sense of touch has been significantly diminished in contemporary technoscientific–informational societies, in favor of the visual and auditory stimuli provided by the exhaustive contact with mobile phone and computer screens, there is also the hypothesis of a current overvaluation of tactile experiences. Robert Jütte (2005) addressed this issue in the chapter Touching – or the New Pleasure in the Body.

In the first half of the twentieth century, there was an understanding that the sense of touch “was losing its importance in sensory knowledge” and that, in postmodern industrial societies, physical contact between human beings—occasional and fortuitous (we apologize when we touch someone)—was gradually replaced by other forms of interpersonal contact, leading to an atrophy of touch (Jütte, 2005: 238–239).

However, in the 1960s, the American media theorist Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan, 1967 apud Jütte, 2005: 240) proposed that television devices produced a particularly multisensory, and therefore also tactile, experience, insofar as cathode rays struck the retina of our eyes. Touch technologies, which require our fingers to slide insistently across computer and mobile phone screens, likewise seem to indicate a hypertrophy of touch. In addition, to nuance a supposed abandonment of tactile experiences, Jütte points to a growing interest in body therapies beginning in the 1960s: massage, chiropractic practices, as well as developments in Freudian and post-Freudian thought, especially that of Wilhelm Reich and the “discovery” of erogenous zones (Jütte, 2005: 245).

If, for Constance Classen (2012), in her book The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, touch still does not occupy its proper place in academic discussions, not even in medical ones—thus implying a deliberate omission in intellectual discourse—on the other hand, according to Maurette (2015), touch has never been forgotten and is not a single sense, but a multiple one. For him, although “Western culture” has historically privileged the sense of sight and failed to recognize in touch a particular intellectual, aesthetic, or moral virtue, philosophical currents that emphasized the body and matter, exalting tactility, have always coexisted.

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Democritus (c. 460–370 BCE), a contemporary of Socrates, was the first to define the senses in a complete manner, including touch (Jütte, 2005: 33). In Plato’s Timaeus (427–347 BCE), the senses were ordered only as taste, smell, hearing, and sight. Unlike the other senses, touch was not linked to a specific organ of the human body: “sensations of pleasure and pain and other qualities perceptible to the senses, such as softness and hardness, heat and cold, heaviness and lightness, are disturbances that affect our body as a whole” (Jütte, 2005: 35). For this reason, iconographically, the association of each sense with specific parts of the human body occurred more commonly when linking the nose to smell, the eyes to sight, the mouth or tongue to taste, and the ears to hearing. Touch, however, was not so easily localized, since the skin (the sensory surface) covers the entire body, and we also perceive tactile sensations internally; nevertheless, hands or fingers—and more precisely the fingertips—were often employed for this associative purpose. Following Jütte’s approach, for Aristotle, the organ of touch was not the skin but the heart. This meant that sensation was not located on the surface of the body but within it (Jütte, 2005: 42).

Although, since ancient thought, the hierarchy of the senses has in some respects relegated touch to the lowest rank—a tendency accentuated in medieval scholastic thought—touch, like taste, was considered especially prone to inducing sins and human vices, such as gluttony or lust. In other respects, however, touch was understood as the sense that allows the highest degree of human development (De Anima, 421,22 apud Jütte, 2005: 69). In authors such as Thomas Aquinas and Avicenna, touch acquired a decisive role in the comprehension of the world. The tactile and the palpable are the interactions par excellence that enable an understanding of reality, alongside sight. At the same time, touch is what primarily guarantees human survival. A certain medicalization of sensations and pain developed from the twelfth century onward among medieval authors who sought to examine individuals afflicted with leprosy; likewise, studies of anesthesia and analgesia—ways of avoiding pain—date back to the origins of medicine and accompany the entire development of medical science (Jütte, 2005: 120–121).

For Campos (2012: 114), however: “The privileged form of encounter with the Sacred in the normal cycle of Christian life would ultimately choose the tangible, touch, as the most important sense for contact, since it is the only one without intermediaries and the most intimate of all the senses, in addition to being the primordial sense, without which life is not possible.”

The visual representation of the sense of touch was not associated with a specific human organ, as we have seen, but hands were commonly adopted in iconography. Indeed, in the Old Testament, the word “hand” is one of the most recurrent in the biblical text. Among the biblical scenes associated with touch is the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise for “touching” the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. In this sense, the ambivalence of touch refers both to salvation—healing through hands or through contact with sacred relics—and to original sin, lust, and sexual pleasures (Jütte, 2005: 98–100).

        As observed by Nordenfalk (1985), during the Middle Ages touch was represented by hands in engravings used as guides for the confession of the sin of lust [Figure 1]. At times, like the other senses, during the Late Middle Ages touch was also symbolized by animals (frescoes in the monastery of Tre Fontane in Rome and in Longthorpe Tower near Peterborough, England) [Figures 2 and 3], following bestiaries in which certain animal species were believed to possess more acute senses than humans. From the chapter Sensi dell’Uomo by Thomas of Cantimpré (c. 1201–1271), certain passages became iconographic themes, reworked pictorially according to principles whereby the spider was considered the animal with the greatest tactile capacity due to its weaving abilities. In addition to spiders, other animals were used to symbolize touch: bats, parrots, turtles, scorpions, and snakes—almost always as an allusion to the fact that nearly all of these creatures can wound us and cause pain.

The relationship between the Five Senses and the Seven Deadly Sins was also represented visually, according to Nordenfalk, as found in a manuscript from 1480 held in the Prints Cabinet of the Bibliothèque nationale de France [Figure 1], originating from a Bavarian monastery. It depicts a scene of confession with emblems of the Seven Deadly Sins intertwined with the Five Senses, in which the gesture of touching something with the fingertips represents Touch. In many cases, Touch was represented by human hands as an emblem. However, during the Middle Ages, the organs associated with the senses were, in some examples, represented in a monstrous manner—exaggerated and disproportionate (Nordenfalk, 1985: 3–4).

         Until the end of the fifteenth century, the representation of touch, like that of all Five Senses, was almost exclusively associated with the male figure. However, citing Nordenfalk (1985: 7): “A sudden change of sex takes place around 1500. From this period onward, the rule is that the five senses should be represented as women.” This change was due not only to a prior association of women with sensuality but also to an alignment with other female allegories such as the Virtues and Vices. Nevertheless, the theme, as a feminine allegory functioning as a declaration of love, appears more clearly and on a large scale in the well-known tapestry of 1480, The Lady and the Unicorn (La Dame à la Licorne, Musée de Cluny) (Bertrand, 1979) [Figure 4].

If, in medieval thought, there was a certain indeterminacy or contradiction regarding touch—between salvation and healing on the one hand, and lust on the other—at the end of the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, even while remaining linked to Eve’s hands touching the forbidden fruit, the sensual character of touch was affirmed not necessarily as something negative, but as part of an acceptable amorous experience. The ideas of Agostino Nifo (Augustinus Niphus, c. 1473–1545) appear to have been fundamental to the defense of the primacy of the senses and to the valorization of touch over sight (commonly understood as superior by Neoplatonists). This debate underlies the aesthetic opposition between Venetian painting (tactile) and Florentine painting (visual).

From the fifteenth century onward, particularly in the Italian Renaissance context, a line of reflection on the senses emerged that sought to recover their positive aspects, partially freeing them from their association with human sins and vices. Moreover, the association between the Five Senses and love was already present in medieval tradition (Nordenfalk, 2005: 8). In Book IV of Mario Equícola’s Libro de Natura de Amore, the senses are directed toward human and sensual love. The author moved beyond the Platonic idea that sight was superior to the other senses and came to defend the primacy of touch, while nonetheless affirming the importance of the moderate use of the senses as a means of enjoying carnal pleasures so as to avoid saturation. In Agostino Nifo’s treatise On Beauty and Love, the hierarchy of the senses and the supremacy of sight defended by Platonism is subverted through the valorization of all the senses as ways of appreciating beauty (Carvalho, 2019).

From the fifteenth century onward, however, the representation of the Five Senses became predominantly a subject of graphic arts, especially in book illustrations. In Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, in its Aldine edition with illustrations by a follower of Mantegna, the representation of the Five Senses acquires its definitive Renaissance character, as five Greek nymphs depicted with their attributes [Figure 5]. Touch is Aphea and, unlike the others, bears no attribute but touches Poliphilo, the main character, with her hands. The emergence of Greek nymphs to represent the senses and touch was, for Nordenfalk (1985: 12–13, 19), a process of “purification.” Based on examples from engravings and porcelain of the sixteenth century, the Five Senses also came to be represented by enamored couples. Another aspect that characterized the iconography of touch in the Renaissance was its isolated representation, independent of a series depicting all the senses.

According to Nordenfalk, the Five Senses — and consequently touch — only regained autonomous treatment in Renaissance art in the engravings of Georg Pencz [Figure 6], produced around 1540. Until then, iconography alternated between animals and human beings; in Pencz’s work, both appear simultaneously and are elevated to a higher plane, combined with classical female nudity similar to that of the Virtues, Temperaments, and Liberal Arts. Nudity reveals, in effect, the sensual aspect of the theme. Pencz’s engravings bear the name of the sense written in Latin and depict seated women engaged in activities allusive to each sense, combined with the animals that represent them: the spider accompanies touch. These engravings would continue to serve as models for a long time, influencing artists such as Étienne Delaune and Hans Dreger.

One variation of the theme, however, diverging from Pencz’s proposal, was its association with scenes from the Life and Passion of Christ [Figure 7] (Nordenfalk: 21–22). The subject appears to have become recurrent in Flemish art in the seventeenth century and in Spanish taste, reproducing itself in engravings [Figures 8 and 9] derived from monumental works such as those of Rubens and Brueghel the Elder [Figure 10], among others.

Touch was represented in painting through various allusive processes, as in Gabrielle d’Estrées and Her Sister in the Bath [Figure 11], an anonymous painting from around 1592, from the School of Fontainebleau, which shows the precise gesture of one figure touching her sister’s breast. In works by Jan Molenaer (1654–1690), David Teniers (1610–1690), Adriaen Brouwer (c. 1605–1638), as well as in Caravaggio [Figure 12], touch is associated with pain and the treatment of illness. The relationship between touch, pain, and suffering was adopted by Cesare Ripa [Figure 13a] in his organization of the book Iconologia (1593), becoming the basis for a series of representations in subsequent centuries, from Mannerism to Rococo (Jütte, 2005: 100–101) [Figure 13b].

Campos (2012, p. 104) wrote: “The situation of the Renaissance man begins by inclining him to unveil the secrets of nature, whether external nature—the world, the universe—or that shared by himself, his own body. Using the senses to know, to delight, to reach God, according to individual pursuit, led, among other paths, also to the aesthetic path of the Baroque, present here, where fertile and splendid nature is a motive for sensory exacerbation that may be salvific. In this regard, the Renaissance provided the raw material for the Baroque. That raw material was undoubtedly sought in nature, in the physical world.”

Touch was considered the lowest of the Five Senses. Unlike sight and hearing—understood as “higher” forms of perceiving reality because they were more closely linked to the spirit—touch occupied a diminished position due to its dependence on the skin and on direct bodily contact with the world in order to produce sensations. While smell and taste, although also requiring bodily interaction with things, occupied an intermediate position in the hierarchy of the Five Senses, touch remained at the lowest level. This long historical construction—philosophical and physiological—that organized and hierarchized sensations in different societies was imbued, in Western cultures, with an ambiguous understanding: on the one hand, positively, as a means of comprehending divine creation or as a method of knowing reality; on the other, negatively, as associated with worldly pleasures and the capital sins. While the negative character of the Five Senses prevailed during the Middle Ages, in the early modern period their positive aspects were gradually affirmed—as forms of spiritual growth, as part of amorous experience, or as components of scientific practices based on empiricism [Figure 14].

Although touch was surrounded by a series of taboos in Western culture, especially regarding the touching of another person’s body—particularly one of the opposite sex [Figure 15]—the eighteenth century and Enlightenment thought came to value tactile sensitivity. This interest focused on the tactile capacity of people with visual impairments. Rousseau warned of the danger of allowing children to engage excessively in heavy manual labor to the point of developing calluses and losing tactile sensitivity or delicacy of touch. Alongside Rousseau, a discourse emerged in medical practice concerning the “art of palpation” (Jütte, 2005: 175–176).

In parallel, libertine culture explored touch as a means of contact with the female body and as an exercise in seduction [Figure 16]. In libertine culture, touch was accommodated in experiences of comfort, seduction, and pleasure [Figure 17], but also in experiments with pain—in the latter case, especially in the work of the Marquis de Sade (Delon, 2000). The eighteenth century constructed a significant cultural valorization of the Five Senses, both in relation to the Religion of Happiness or Religious Enlightenment (Bailey, 2017), Sensualist Philosophy (Jütte, 2005), and Libertine Culture (Delon, 2000). This trajectory was consistently marked by the visual element, that is, by the corresponding imagistic representation of the Five Senses, through different iconographic and iconological paths.

Angela Brandão

Universidade Federal de São Paulo

CNPq

January 21, 2026 

*This work is the result of research carried out with the support of CNPq — Research Productivity Grant.

**Translation: Amanda Paitax (UNIFESP)

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