FINE ART, COMMON SCENTS
France’s best noses have put their minds to creating perfumes to match some of the Louvre’s great artworks
France is famous for many things, and certainly fine art and perfume are among them. Now its most famous museum is uniting the two.
The museum has commissioned two of France’s top “noses” — otherwise known as perfume creators — to come up with fragrances to go with some of its greatest treasures.
Ramdane Touhami and Victoire de Taillac roped in some of the biggest stars of the olfactory universe to help them find the right notes to go with eight works in total, including two statues, the Venus de
Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
The pair of noses, founders of the Officine Universelle Buly perfumerie, were also asked to pair fragrances with French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ two most sensual works, the Grande Odalisque and The
Valpincon Bather as well as Thomas
Gainsborough’s Conversation in a Park and Georges de La Tour’s Joseph the Carpenter.
A glaring omission is the museum’s most famous work, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
For now, as so much else about her, her scent will remain a secret.
Controversially, among the paintings chosen is Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Bolt, painted in 1777. Depicting a young man standing on tiptoe
to lock a door while he clings to a woman, it was once described as a seduction scene but some critics now say it raises questions of consent.
They argue that the woman in the scene appears to be resisting the man as he bolts shut the bedroom door.
Touhami said he had wanted to gather the very best noses for the job.
“It is about adding an olfactory dimension to a visual experience. I chose eight
parfumeurs, all stars, and gave them 100% freedom,” he added.
Dorothee Piot, who works for Robertet house in the French perfume capital of Grasse, chose Gainsborough’s 1745 work, a selfportrait of the artist with his wife Margaret in an Elysian English landscape.
“I wanted to create something fresh and delicate to go with their bucolic exterior scene … so I came up with a perfume inspired by roses that have just come out surrounded by greenery.”
Museum spokesman Adel Ziane said the idea of the perfumes was “to help wake all the senses of visitors as they view the work at the Louvre”.
The eight fragrances will be on sale at a pop-up shop from this Wednesday until January next year. — AFP and Elizabeth Sleith