The Five Senses and the Four Elements

The table can be read like a puzzle, with nine answers hidden in it. Hearing is the lute, a small flute called a flageolet, and a sheet of music. Sight is the mirror and the wine glass, smell the flowers, taste the fruit, and touch a mortar and pestle and a wooden shaving box. The four elements run alongside. Earth is the vegetables, fire the warming brazier, water the ewer, and air the bellows and a bird of paradise, a bird Europeans then believed spent its whole life in flight. The format goes back to Flemish still lifes of the early 17th century. The canvas itself has a modern story. It was bought by the fine-arts museum in Algiers around 1957, and it has been kept at the Louvre since 1970 as a deposit under a French-Algerian agreement signed in 1968.