Explain the symbolism of Jan Bruegel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens’s Allegory of Sight and suggest how it relates to contemporary revelations about the universe

Question

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

1. The ideal response would include the following:
In the last half of the sixteenth century, the Western conception of the universe began to change dramatically, thanks in part to the invention of the telescope. Thus when Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder joined forces to paint a series of paintings on the theme of the five senses, they knew that the new universe had to be addressed in their Allegory of Sight. In the painting, as Venus contemplates a painting of Christ healing the blind, she appears melancholy, as if realizing that the physical love that she and Cupid embody falls short of Christian spiritual love. Christ’s healing gesture suggests the power of faith—that is, he restores “true vision.” The monkey at the bottom center of the allegory holds a pair of spectacles, a symbol of those who look but do not see.
2. Thus far, Brueghel and Rubens convey the traditional moral and religious convictions of the Church. But the presence of scientific instruments in the painting—the globe, the telescope, the magnifying glass, the astrolabe, and others—transforms the work into an allegory of seeing that would come to dominate thinking in the seventeenth century: the visual world was increasingly seen as an expression of what might be called divine space. For the next three centuries, the Western imagination would imbue the physical world with suggestions of the divine.