Krakow’s Czartoryski Museum was founded in 1796 by Princess Izabela Czartoryska to preserve Polish heritage. It houses many treasures, including Greek and Egyptian antiquities.
But the jewel in the crown of its art collection is “The Lady with an Ermine,” an oil on wood artwork painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th century.
Every year, hordes of visitors flock to the Czartoryski Museum to admire Krakow’s own Mona Lisa. Soon, they’ll not only be able to admire it, but smell it too.
Curators at the Krakow National Museum have teamed up with Slovenian scientists to create a fragrance that replicates the scent of “The Lady with an Ermine,” reports TVP World.
This fragrance blends aromas of walnut – the wood on which Leonardo da Vinci painted this portrait – but also of varnish, oil and tempera. Elżbieta Zygier, chief conservator of the National Museum in Krakow, finds the aroma “pleasant and complex,” if rather unsettling.
It took several months for the researchers to compose this scent inspired by “The Lady with an Ermine.” Visitors will soon be able to discover the smell for themselves, alongside the painting.
According to TVP World, visitors will be able to smell the fragrance on a kind of “pen,” as it was impossible to spray the scent in the room where Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece is exhibited.
Multisensory experiences
The Czartoryski Museum has not yet announced when art lovers will be able to smell the scent of “The Lady with an Ermine.”
Nevertheless, the scientists behind this initiative are already working on the creation of further scents inspired by other works of art, as part of the Odotheka project.
All over the world, art establishments are appealing to people’s sense of smell to craft a multisensory visitor experience. Indeed, this sense is far more powerful than is commonly imagined.
The human nose is capable of distinguishing some 1,000 billion different odours, according to an American study, published in 2014 in the journal Science.
That’s far more than the figure of 10,000 long cited by the scientific community. So it makes sense to stimulate our sense of smell at the museum, especially as this sense is intimately linked to our memories.
France’s Centre des Monuments Nationaux has understood this, and since March 19 has been offering an olfactory experience as part of its tour of the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris.
Also in the French capital, the Musée National de la Marine teamed up with Nathalie Lorson, master perfumer at Firmenich, in 2023, to create a scent evoking the smell of the open sea.
Prior to this, Madrid’s Prado Museum staged an exhibition based around the painting “The Sense of Smell” by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, for which perfume diffusers were installed to bring the painting to life in a new way.