El sentido de la vista

When Jan Brueghel and his friend Peter Paul Rubens painted this in 1617, the telescope was barely eight years old, and Antwerp was mad for instruments that extended the eye. So they filled this room to the ceiling with them: a telescope, a magnifying glass, an armillary sphere, globes, and wall after wall of paintings and sculpture. Brueghel laid in every gleaming object and Rubens added the figures, Venus holding up a picture while a small Cupid steadies it for her. Sight had been called the noblest of the senses since Aristotle, and the two men treat it here as a collector's paradise. The canvas Venus studies shows Christ healing a blind man, a reminder that the eye was thought to reach the soul as well as the world.