With its 2018 exhibition ‘Perfumes of China’, created in partnership with the perfumer-creator of Dior Parfums, François Demachy, the Cernushi Museum in Paris pioneered a new form of immersive exhibition experience. Amplifying the theme of the exhibition, Demachy reinterpreted perfumes based on ancient Chinese formulas translated and selected by the exhibition's scientific advisor Frédéric Obringer (CNRS).

Exploring Chinese civilisation from the 3rd century BC to the 19th century AD through the art of incense and perfume, the exhibition brought together more than 100 art and archaeological objects for the first time. Alongside these objects, the exhibition presented the richly scented raw materials used to make them – including eagle wood, sandalwood, ambergris, musk, patchouli, olibanum incense, styrax, camphor, cloves and benzoin. Through five olfactory terminals visitors could discover ancient incense ingredients and recipes dating from the great periods of Chinese history: Six Dynasties, Tang, Song, Ming and Qing.

In 2021, Amsterdam’s Rijskmuseum recreated the scent of the Battle of Waterloo to accompany Jan Willem Pieneman’s celebrated work The Battle of Waterloo, painted in 1824. Through a collaboration with Caro Verbeek, Dutch researcher of olfactory heritage, the smell of the battlefield – gunpowder, and earth trampled by horses – transports visitors into the midst of the famous battle of June 1815 between Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington as they view the painting. (Verbeek’s previous credits include reconstructing the smell of the Dutch football team's dressing room after its Euro 1988 victory – coconut oil, sweat, Champagne, Fresh Up deodorant, dirty clothes and a specific brand of shower gel.)

In Madrid, the Museo del Prado presented ‘The Essence of a Painting. An Olfactory Exhibition’ in 2022, curated by Alejandro Vergara, Chief Curator of Flemish Painting and the Northern Schools at the Museo Nacional del Prado, and Gregorio Sola, Senior Perfumer at Puig and an academician of the Perfume Academy.

The focus of the exhibition, The Sense of Smell, painted by Jan Brueghel and Rubens (1617–18), represents the garden of rare trees and plants belonging to Isabel Clara Eugenia and her husband in early 17^th-century Brussels, depicting more than 80 species of plants and flowers, as well as various animals associated with the sense of smell, such as the scent hound and civet, and a range of objects relating to the world of perfume. Enabling visitors to appreciate the painting on a deeper level, Sola created ten fragrances associated with various elements, among them ‘Allegory’ which encourages viewers to focus on the bouquet of flowers that the allegorical figure is smelling; ‘Gloves’, which reproduces the smell of gloves scented with ambergris; and ‘Orange Blossom’, which directs the eye towards the still used to obtain the extract from the flowers.

More recently, Le Louvre in Paris has invited visitors to discover various works from its permanent and temporary collections through a sensory journey, soaking up the scents of flowers, fruit and painted objects to gain a deeper sense of the emotions specific to each work.

The ‘Eternal Mucha’ exhibition, which opened at the Grand Palais in Paris in March 2023, invites visitors to discover the story of Alphonse Mucha and his major works through both scent and sight. TechnicoFlor perfumer Marie-Caroline Symard composed four fragrances for the exhibition: an olfactory atmosphere of the artist's studio, and three creations that illustrate three key influences on his career: Flowers (which were “omnipresent in Mucha's life and work”, says Symard); Moravia, where he spent his childhood; and Sarah Bernhard, a tribute to the artist’s friendship with the actress: “I imagined the fragrance of this mythical actress – to whom Jacques Guerlain dedicated ‘Voilà Pourquoi J'aimais Rosine’ in 1900 – by blending the floral-oriental accord with violet and camellia, Sarah Bernhardt's favourite flowers,” explains Symard.

Immersive exhibitions such as these have become something of a trend in France, with smaller museums such as the Musée Matisse in Nice, the Musée des Arts Précieux Paul-Dupuy in Toulouse, La Piscine in Roubaix (Musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent) organising olfactory visits to (re)discover their collections differently and more intensely.

As well as engaging visitors more deeply, the use of scent in museums can make art more accessible, especially for the visually impaired or those with mental health problems. Marie Clapot, Deputy Head of Accessibility at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been integrating scent into the museum for several years.

A Duty of Remembrance

Since April 2022, Odeuropa has collaborated with Museum Ulm in Germany to present ‘Follow Your Nose: A Guided Tour with Smells’, inviting visitors to discover the museum’s art collection through their noses, thanks to smells developed by the fragrance company IFF. By creating historically informed smell interpretations, museum visits became a multi-sensory experience, opening new opportunities to enjoy, learn and engage with the collection. During Museum Ulm’s closure for renovation from April 2023 until 2025, the tour will be recreated at the museum’s temporary home, Kunstahlle Weishaupt, also in Ulm.

Odeuropa’s greater mission is to show that critically engaging our sense of smell and our scent heritage is an important means of connecting with Europe’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The project was developed by a team of historians, linguists, art historians, perfumers, chemists and artificial intelligence specialists from the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, Slovenia and the United Kingdom. The researchers are creating a database of the smells and perfumes that could have been experienced in Europe between the 16th and early 20th centuries, identifying how ‘smell’ was expressed in different languages, with what places it was associated, what kinds of events and practices it characterised, and to what emotions it was linked. The information will be stored in the ‘European Olfactory Knowledge Graph’ (EOKG), and then drawn on to create new ‘storylines’ for different audiences and situations – including museum and art gallery exhibitions that will harness the power of scent to offer visitors a richer experience of the works being displayed.