AHR Forum

The Portal of Touch

ELIZABETH D. HARVEY

RENAISSANCE NATURALISTS, REPEATING a belief inherited from Pliny and Ovid, claimed
that a bear cub was born as a lump of flesh that was licked into ursine shape by its
mother’s tongue.1 While the myth exemplifies an extreme form of maternal touch,
twentieth-century scientific studies of animal behavior repeatedly demonstrate that
nurturing contact between a mother and her offspring—behavior distinctive to
mammals—is vital to establishing the physiological processes that sustain life in the
organism. A mother cat licks her newborn kitten less to clean it than to stimulate
its bodily systems; without this lingual touch, the kitten is less likely to survive.2
Psychosocial medical research, following H. F. Harlow’s pioneering work on rhesus
monkeys in the 1950s, extended this insight to human infants: babies deprived of
touch because of hospitalization or separation from the mother showed deficits of
intelligence, abnormal psychological development, and perhaps compromised
immune systems.3 The media’s coverage in 1990 of the plight of Romanian orphans
under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime brought the tragic effects of tactile depriva-
tion to renewed and sensational public attention. Western culture’s relatively re-
cent recognition of the primacy of touch is striking because it stages a retrieval
of tactility, foregrounding the importance of a sensory faculty that seems to have
been lost or overshadowed by the other four senses. Throughout its history, in fact,
touch has always been simultaneously the least and the most important of the five
senses.
The human sensory faculties of sight, smell, taste, and hearing are housed in
elegantly concentrated organs in the head. The sense of touch, by contrast, is dis-
persed throughout the body. Receptors of touch—Meissner and Pacinian corpuscles,
I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which funded this
research, and to the University of Toronto’s Awards of Excellence program, which supported the ex-
emplary work of my research assistant, Tim Harrison. I am indebted to Richard Newhauser and Corine
Schleif for their invitation to present an early version of this essay in a symposium on the five senses
at the Institute for Humanities Research, Arizona State University, and to Ayesha Ramachandran and
the participants of a seminar at the Humanities Institute, Stonybrook University, for their insightful
feedback. I would also like to record my thanks to Pamela Smith for a series of conversations that
illuminated the artisanal background of the Rubens/Breughel painting.
1 Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (London, 1607), 37. I have silently mod-

ernized i, j, u, v, and long s, and expanded contractions in citations from early modern treatises. All italics
are in the original texts.
2 Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (New York, 1971), 20– 46.
3 Ibid., 96–102. See also Stephen J. Suomi, “Touch and the Immune System in Rhesus Monkeys,”

in Tiffany M. Field, ed., Touch in Early Development (Mahwah, N.J., 1995), 89–104.

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386 Elizabeth D. Harvey

Ruffini endings, Merkel’s disks—bound the body and organize its relationship to the
ambient world through their delicate calibrations of pleasure, pain, weight, and tem-
perature. The “medium of the tangible,” Aristotle proclaimed in De Anima, “is
flesh.”4 Touch inheres in the body and is contiguous with its substance. Tactility is
the essential sense, according to Aristotle, because it orients the body to qualities
of temperature and texture that allow it to sense danger. All bodies that possess
souls also have the faculty of touch, he argues, for “without touch an animal cannot
exist.”5
More than any other sense, touch establishes our sentient border with the world.
It is also the sensory faculty that shapes our social connections; it is primarily through
touch that we form and express our bonds with others. Gestures of contact—a hand-
shake, kiss, or caress—define the nuances of our relationships, the subtle inflections
of class, power, and familial bonds. The social “tact” that regulates these interactions
recognizes the incendiary power of sexual touch, even as it also affirms our funda-
mental need for human physical contact. The twentieth-century acknowledgment of
tactility’s importance, however, is counterbalanced by warnings about the dangers
of such illicit touching as incest, child abuse, and sexual harassment. Conflating touch
with the flesh, as historical understanding of the sense does, exacerbates its am-
biguous nature, its indispensability, and its hazards. Although haptic sensors con-
gregate densely in such strategic locations as the sexual organs and the hands, touch,
as the poet Phineas Fletcher put it in his seventeenth-century allegory of the body
The Purple Island, has “his abode in none, yet every place.”6 The history of touch
is shaped by this anomaly of its corporeal distribution, of being simultaneously ev-
erywhere and nowhere.
Embedded within the skin and the flesh, tactility is assimilated to—and often
considered to be coterminous with—the body. The deep ambivalence about cor-
poreality inculcated in Western culture through Christianity and Platonism thus also
encompasses the sense of touch. In his great cosmological dialogue the Timaeus,
Plato turns from his description of chaos, the primary elemental and geometrical
bodies that make up the universe, to a discussion of flesh, the mortal soul, and sen-
sation. Describing the body’s phenomenological experience of heat, weight, rough-
ness, and smoothness, qualities that orient the body to the world, he delineates the
operations of touch without ever naming it. Touch for Plato is a quality of the flesh,
a sensible apparatus that interprets the impressions around it. “That is called hard
to which our flesh yields, and soft which yields to our flesh,” he says, describing
the body’s encounter with pliant and unyielding substances.7 The characteristics of
the environment are named through their relationship to the sensing instrument
of touch. If the body constitutes the world through sensation, the world also recip-
rocally establishes bodily coherence through that contact. Plato’s imaging of the
tactile flesh as a creative interface between body and world uncannily anticipates

4Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul ), trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 423b.
5Ibid., 435a, 435b. The context is Aristotle’s discussion of sensation, and he is thus speaking spe-
cifically of animal, not plant, bodies in this passage.
6 Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island, in Frederick S. Boas, ed., Giles and Phineas Fletcher: Poetical

Works (Cambridge, 1909), vol. 1: Canto 5, 55.

7 Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., Collected

Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters (Princeton, N.J., 1961), 62B.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of touch as the double sensation: the hand

embodies both the agency of touching and the receptivity of being touched.8 To touch
is also always to be touched.
While touch is for Plato fundamental to bodily experience, his ambivalence about
its importance is registered through his refusal to name it, an elision that necessarily
works as a kind of erasure. Crucial to human existence but invisible, touch is con-
signed to the first, and lowest, place in his hierarchy. Plato’s ascending ladder of the
senses—touch, taste (a form of touch), smell, hearing, and sight—established an
order with long-lasting metaphysical implications.9 The power of touch lies in its
capacity to establish relationship, but this capacity depends upon the proximity, the
contiguity, of toucher to touched. The relative supremacy of vision for Plato, by
contrast, inheres in its ability to see things at a great distance: stars, the sun, the
heavens. The sight of the alternations of night and day created numbers, Plato tells
us, which gave us time, and the ability to inquire “about the nature of the universe.”10
When Plato speaks of sight as streams of vision “touching,” the beams are composed
of ethereal streams of light, and they are far removed from the density of fleshly
matter that characterizes touch.
Whereas sight is associated with philosophy and transcendence of the body, touch
for Plato is resolutely anchored in the sensible flesh. Plato distinguishes touch from
the other senses through its capacity to produce pleasurable or painful sensation: an
impression or touch that is contrary to nature (burning or cutting) provokes pain,
and one that returns us to nature allows us to feel pleasure.11 Later iconic repre-
sentations of touch depicted the poles of bodily sensation in images of tooth ex-
tractions, painful bites from parrots or falcons, flagellations, and naked breasts that
promised the pleasure of sexual indulgence.12 Although Plato does not make the
connection explicit, subsequent early modern thinking about the emotions tied sen-
sation to the passions. In The Passions of the Mind (1601), Thomas Wright under-
stood the senses and the passions as being bound together like “two naughty ser-
vants,” for the passions are “drowned in corporall organs and instruments, as well
as sense.”13 The passions, aided by their “cousin german,” the senses, are the body’s
rebels, mutinous forces that must be controlled by the will and reason. If touch
designates in its most literal sense a contact between bodies or objects, an abutting
in space that produces feeling, it is also imbricated with the passions and the emo-

8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, 2002; orig.

French ed. 1945), 106–107.

9 Plato, Timaeus, 61D–65B. See the commentary in Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato, trans.

Francis Macdonald Cornford (Indianapolis, 1957).

10 Plato, Timaeus, 47A–B.
11 Ibid., 64 –65B.
12 Sander Gilman, “Touch, Sexuality and Disease,” in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, eds., Medicine

and the Five Senses (Cambridge, 1993), 198–224, 2010.

13 Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601), 14 –15. Indeed, Wright suggests, since

the time of our infancy and childhood, the senses have been “joint-friends” with the passions:
whatsoever delighted sense, pleased the passions; and whosoever was hurtfull to the one, was an
enemy to the other; and so, by long agreement and familaritie, the passions had so engaged
themselves to sense, and with such bondes and seales of sensuall habites confirmed their friend-
ship, that as soone as reason came to possession of her kingdome, they beganne presently to make
rebellions for right reason oftentimes deprived sense of those pleasures he had of long time en-
joyed. (16)

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tional states that come to define the self. We can observe this connection in a set
of metaphorical connotations that pertain to the emotional life of human subjects:
“to feel deeply” and “to be touched” are expressions that describe passionate or
affective response. The OED’s entry for “touch” is the longest in the dictionary. It
catalogues early examples of the emotional valence of touch, which often begin with
an impossibly literal description of interior contact, a physically invasive touch to the
brain, the mind, or, most commonly, the heart.14
This semantic migration emerges in the early philosophical debates about the
phenomenology of touch. Citing Aristotle and the Paduan anatomist Julius Casserius
Placentinus, Helkiah Crooke, in his encyclopedic English anatomy Mikrokos-
mographia (1615), invokes the central debate concerning sensory perception: does
sensation occur because the organ of sense acts upon an object, or is the object itself
the agent, making the sense organ merely a passive recipient? Although Crooke
ultimately reconciles his sources, arguing that sensation must be a complex mixture
of action and reception, a dialectical interplay between the subject and the ambient
world, he also suggests that “to perceive is a kind of suffering,” for “Sensation hap-
neth in that which is moved and suffereth.” Crooke is, of course, activating the ety-
mon of “passive” from the Latin passivus, “to be acted upon,” but his language offers
a physiology of feeling that links the senses to the passions: the action of the senses
is, he says, “a motien through a body which suffers in the Sensation.”15 Suffering turns
out to be reciprocal, not unlike Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of mutual touching. For
Crooke, sensation happens when the sense is converted into the nature of the sen-
sible thing, in other words, through an alteration. The sensible object changes the
sense, transforming it to its own nature, and it is this conversion of essence that
causes suffering.
The interface between touch as sensation and emotional feeling, a legacy that
pervades the history of tactility and our everyday language, has been explored with
great fertility by such psychoanalytic and philosophical thinkers as Gilles Deleuze,
Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, and Luce Irigaray. In his magisterial psychoan-
alytic work The Skin Ego (Le Moi Peau), Didier Anzieu argues that the history of
touching instantiates the subject’s boundaries and the qualities of his or her emo-
tional life. Anzieu reminds us that during embryological development, the gastrula
differentiates itself into two germ layers, the ectoderm and the endoderm. The ec-
toderm furnishes the cells that become the brain and the skin, and although we
customarily think of the brain as located in the body’s interior, both are part of the
nervous system.16 To reformulate Ashley Montagu, the mind is in the skin.17 Western
culture typically positions epistemological truth at the center or core, Anzieu re-
minds us; the nucleus of a cell, for instance, contains essential genetic material and
is thus seen to control the cell’s future. Recent biological research has focused in-
creasingly on the membrane as the cell’s command center, however, because it gov-
erns the exchange of ions at the cell walls. Anzieu’s paradoxical re-territorialization
14 Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, Conn., 1989; orig. French ed. 1985),
13.
15 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man, Together with the Con-

troversies Thereto Belonging (London, 1615), 656. All subsequent references are to the 1615 edition.
16 Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 9–10.
17 Montagu, Touching, 3.

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of knowledge, which sees “the centre located at the periphery,” recognizes the es-
sential role that surface, most obviously the skin, plays in the organization and in-
stantiation of the human subject.18 The cell membrane functions much as skin does:
both are sensory envelopes, boundaries of communication or exchange. Anzieu re-
minds us that cytoplasmic cell membranes have a double-layered architecture, which
he likens to Freud’s mystic writing pad, where one layer serves as a protective shield
and the other operates as a writing surface.19 Neural activity is a function not only
of the brain, then, but also of the body’s margins, its interface with the environment.
Although Aristotle and early modern thinkers debated whether skin was a me-
dium (an intermediary element between the sense organ and the object of sensation)
of touch, and which of its various layers was sensible, Sir John Davies saw the body’s
integument as a web of nerves or sensation:20

Lastly the Feeling power, which is Lifes roote,

Through every living part it selfe doth shed,
By sinewes, which extend from head to foote,
And like a Net all ore the bodie spred.21

Because touch is a property of the body’s cutaneous covering, skin becomes the
largest and most essential organ of sense. This somatic dispersion is necessary,
Crooke tells us, because “nature did everywhere require the presence . . . [of touch]
for the security of the life of the creature.” Indeed, the linkage between tactility and
safety is a constant refrain for Crooke. Even when the infant is in the “prison of the
wombe,” “hee neither seeth, not heareth, nor smelleth, nor tasteth any thing, but yet
hath absolute necessity of the sense of Touching that he may be able to avoyde
imminent dangers.”22 The skin’s delicate net of sensibility thus records the subject’s
interaction with the world. This writing on the body’s dermal container marks its
encounter with weather, the exigencies of social class and gender, and it also points
to the conveyance of tactility into the body’s interior, to what Anzieu explores as
psychic life that is shaped by tactile experience.
In the second book of Mikrokosmographia, as the anatomist prepares to remove
the skin from the cadaver, Crooke invokes its protective function. The “Scarfe-skin
or Cuticle” is a “muniment” set to “defend the skinne from the violence of outward
injuries,” for it is “the wall of the Castle.” “The more fiercelie it is beseiged . . . the
more safely it doth defend, and the more strength it doth give to the inward parts.”
The next layer, a fleshly membrane, is “an avant Mure or inward counter-scarfe
[which] is ordained as a secret defence to hold out a second assault.” It serves “to
make up the breaches of the wall,” and to “helpe to consolidate the skin being
wounded, or otherwise violated.”23 While the skin, like armor, is designed to protect
18 Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 8–9.
19 Ibid., 10.
20 Crooke argues that while the “scarfe-skin,” or cuticle, is in itself insensible, it is nevertheless the

“meane of touching”; Mikrokosmographia, 7. See the fine discussion of Aristotle’s formulation of the
tactile medium in Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York, 2007),
26–30.
21 Sir John Davies, Nosce teipsum (London, 1599), 45.
22 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 531, 648.
23 Ibid., 61.

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the body, it is also a permeable membrane, an intelligencer or go-between, calibrated

to facilitate traffic with both the body’s interior and its surroundings. Crooke says
that skin is perforated with pores, like a sieve or a fishnet, to allow for transpiration.24
Just as pores enable somatic reception and emission, so the skin is also equipped with
sensors, conduits of communication through which the body collects sensory infor-
mation and transports that tactile data into the interior. Although the function of
touch is protective, then, the body’s very receptivity to the world around it para-
doxically makes tactility an aperture to the inside, providing as many points of vul-
nerability as there are sensors. This sensitivity establishes the welfare of human be-
ings in many subtler ways besides physical preservation, perhaps most importantly
as a way of defining the human subject within his or her own bodily boundaries and
in relation to others. Far from a merely physiological membrane that encloses the
body, skin—and by extension touch—mediates at the interface of the soma and the
sensate, conscious psyche.
Juan Valverde de Amusco’s engraving of a flayed muscleman in his Anatomia del
corpo humano (1560) provides one of the most haunting early modern depictions of
the skin, that “great unseamed garment” that bounds the body and gives it coherence
and human identity.25 (See Figure 1.) Valverde’s écorché holds the anatomist’s knife
in one hand and a sheath of skin in the other. The flayed man gazes at the cutaneous
envelope, but the skin, far from dissolving into unarticulated folds, retains the im-
print of its human facial features. The other four senses figure as small perforations
in the skin, what Sir John Davies named “the wickets of the Soule” and Crooke calls
“foramina,” outlets or passages in this large organ of sensibility.26 In John Milton’s
closet drama Samson Agonistes, the eponymous hero mourns his lost faculty of sight,
offering a potent meditation on the relationship between the preeminence of sight
and the bodily dispersal of touch: “why was the sight / To such a tender ball as the
eye confined? / So obvious and so easy to be quenched, / And not as feeling through
all parts diffused / That she might look at will through every pore?”27 Samson con-
jures an image of touch that would scatter eyes across the body’s surface, rendering
it unassailable, a visual version of tactility’s protection of corporeal boundaries.
Valverde’s engraving could stand as an illustration of Milton’s vigilant skin or of
Crooke’s assertions about touch: whereas the other senses “are restrained within
some small organ about the brayne,” “touching is diffused through the whole
body.”28 Touching is the preeminent sense, says Crooke, because “every sense is a
kind of Touching.”29 The muscleman gazes at his flayed skin as if he could speak to
it, and the two faces thus implicitly address each other in a dialogue of interior to
exterior.

24Ibid., 73.
25Ibid.; Juan Valverde de Amusco, Anatomia del corpo humano (Rome, 1560).
26 Davies, Nosce teipsum, 43.
27 John Milton, Samson Agonistes, in Milton, The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair

Fowler (London, 1968), ll. 93–97.

28 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 648.
29 Ibid.

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 The Portal of Touch 391

FIGURE 1: Etching of the muscles. From Juan Valverde de Amusco, Anatomia del corpo humano (Rome, 1560),
64. Reproduced courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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392 Elizabeth D. Harvey

BARTOLOMEO DEL BENE’S PHILOSOPHICAL dream poem Civitas veri sive morum (The
City of Truth or Ethics) (1609) explores the ethical dimensions of sensory perception
in general and of the sense of touch in particular. The poem refashions Aristotle’s
Nichomachean Ethics, providing an evocative allegorical psychology of sense per-
ception.30 In del Bene’s poem, the soul is represented as a city that can be entered
by five portals. The iconography of the senses is, of course, rich in imagery of the
five sensory portals, which ranges from Edmund Spenser’s five bulwarks of the Castle
of Alma in The Faerie Queene, and the “Cinque Ports” or “five imaginary forts” of
Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” to the five gates of the senses that bound
the city in del Bene’s poem.31 The incorporated soul animates the body or kingdom,
a familiar image that sutures theories of government, the body politic, to philo-
sophical and medical understandings of the somatic-psychic nexus, the body natural.
Del Bene, following Aristotle, examines the way the senses function as an interface,
a gateway, not only between the body and its interior, psychic dimensions, but also
between the private urges of the individual and social or civic responsibility. For the
senses of touch, in particular, we can also chart a gateway between the physical act
of touching and its social aspects, “tact,” the restraining of haptic behaviors. At-
tendant upon the cultivation of tact is the governing of emotion, the feeling that
becomes a psychic extension of physical contact. Del Bene features Mars and Venus
bound in Vulcan’s net atop the Portal of Touch, a figuration that serves a monitory
function, a warning about the dangers of aggressive or seductive touch that can
quickly convert into powerful feelings or affect that in turn translate into the social
actions of war and illicit sexuality. The Mars and Venus narrative is linked to the
iconography of touch precisely because the myth encapsulates so many of the fea-
tures of touch as a sense: pleasure and pain, illicit sexuality, manual skill, and social
tact.
As Homer tells it in the Odyssey, Vulcan was a gifted blacksmith, an artist of
metalwork. He was lame, crippled, when Juno threw him off Mount Olympus; his
misshapen body may have made Venus, his beautiful wife, particularly vulnerable to
Mars’s amorous advances. When Vulcan learned that they were having an affair, he
went off to his smithy, set his anvil in place, and began to forge a magical web of
chains. Ovid tells us in the Metamorphoses that the net was so fine that it could escape
the detection of the eye.32 Nothing could surpass the subtlety of Vulcan’s device, not
even a spider’s web. But like a web, Vulcan’s net was so sensitive that it would yield
to the slightest touch or movement. The spider is, of course, an iconic figure of touch
because it extends its sense of tactility into its web, thus exerting a control over its
environment that amplifies touch and lends it a power that is more typically asso-

30 Bartolomeo del Bene, Civitas veri sive morum (Paris, 1609). For discussions of this poem, see

Frances A. Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, J 1947), 111; Bruce R. Smith,
The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago, 1999), 101–102; and
Claire Richter Sherman, Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Carlisle,
Pa., 2000), 139–140.
31 Del Bene, Civitas veri sive morum, 28–29; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P.

Roche, Jr. (New Haven, Conn., 1981), 2.11.7–13; Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House,” in The
Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, rev. ed. (Harlow, 2007): l. 349.
32 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (1916; repr., Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 1:

book IV, 170–189.

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ciated with vision or acoustic senses.33 As Mars and Venus embraced in bed, the
culmination of their erotic touching, they were caught in the metallic spider web that
Vulcan had fashioned. Vulcan then called the gods to come and gaze at the trapped
lovers, and Mars and Venus were shamed by their uproarious laughter.
It is this net of craft, which is also the web of the haptic, that contains and restrains
Mars and Venus in del Bene’s image. They represent respectively the blow or tocca
of martial touch and the allure of erotic contact. The coupling of Mars and Venus
calls up the shaming of their public exposure before the gods, a display of their naked,
joined flesh. “Shame” is a word thought by etymologists to descend from a Teutonic
root meaning “covering” or “garment,” which may refer to the painful emotion that
results from an exposure of indecorous behavior, and it may also point to the coloring
of the skin evident in a blush of shame.34 The complexity of del Bene’s iconic pin-
ioning of the couple within the net eloquently displays the confusion of inside and
outside that is always part of the history of touch. The arachnoid sensibility of the
lovers’ skin is held within Vulcan’s net, a sign of the blacksmith’s manual artistry.
Mars and Venus adorn the Portal of Touch, the gateway that marks tactility’s sensory
entrance into the body, but also the ingress of touch into Aristotle’s ethical city.
The themes of touch exemplified in del Bene’s poem and their linkage to the Mars
and Venus myth achieve quintessential expression in The Allegory of Touch (1617),
one of a series of paintings on the five senses that hang in the Museo Nacional del
Prado in Madrid.35 (See Figure 2.) The work is collaborative, displaying the artistic
signatures of two “hands”: Peter Paul Rubens painted Venus and Cupid, and Jan
Brueghel the Elder executed the background and the armor. Brueghel was fascinated
by the Mars and Venus myth, painting such renditions as Venus Visiting Vulcan’s
Forge and various versions of An Allegory of Fire and The Disarming of Mars.36 For
Brueghel and Rubens, the myth exemplified a reconciliation of Mars, the god of war,
painful touch, wounds, and armor with the seductive allurements of Venus, love,
flesh, and eroticism. This image engages the early modern history of touch through
the painting’s condensation of a series of complex ideas about the cultural history
of tactility. It gestures to the nexus between the body and its affective life (being
emotionally “touched”), the medical and anatomical understanding of skin as both
a bodily covering and a receptor for touch, the nature of manual and artisanal work,
and the mythological narratives about touch that undergird early modern culture.
This painting is the least-discussed of the five sensory allegories in this series, per-
haps partly because touch has a relatively eclipsed history, and partly because the
painting is enigmatic, cluttered as it is with great heaps of armor, and bifurcated into
two apparently distinct sections. This structure is reflective of its intricate, layered
treatment of a sensory faculty that thinkers in the Western tradition, beginning with
Aristotle, took to be foundational to life itself.
The painting alludes everywhere to the realm of the haptic. The foreground is
strewn with pieces of armor and weapons, as if it were scattered with dismembered
knightly bodies. Dominating the heap of breastplates, greaves, cuirasses, shields,
33Davies, Nosce teipsum, 45.
34Oxford English Dictionary, entries for “shame” and “hame.”
35 Anne T. Woollett and Ariane van Suchtelen, Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship (Los

Angeles, 2006).
36 For a full description of these paintings, see ibid.

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394 Elizabeth D. Harvey

FIGURE 2: Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Allegory of Touch (1617). Prado Museum,
Madrid. Photo credit: AKG-Images.

helmets, crossbows, and spears are three partially assembled suits of armor, with the
central armored figure gripping a pole and gazing at the viewer like some ghostly
warrior readying himself for battle. In the left middle distance, we can see two ar-
morers at work, one hammering a sheet of iron or steel on an anvil, the other pol-
ishing or beating sheets of recently worked metal, while a third figure to their right
assembles the finished pieces. A forge in the center registers the tangible sensation
of heat and fire’s ability to render metal ductile, capable of being molded by the
hammer’s blows, while the act of hammering evokes the etymology of touch, cognate
as it is with the Italian tocca, a blow or strike. The elaborate workmanship of the
ornately embossed goldwork on the armor offers synesthetic evidence of the black-
smith’s manual skill, an ornamentation that would have been as pleasing to the eye
as it was palpable to the hand. This detail and many other elements in the painting
implicate the viewer, synesthetically transposing the more obvious visual register into
the realm of the tactile. Sentience, the ability to perceive through the senses, be-
comes here an elaborate exercise in experiencing one sense—touch—through the
faculty of vision, the sensory mechanism activated when we gaze at the painting. In
this allegory, sentience is thus transmuted into consciousness, an apperceptive form
of knowing that enables the viewer to become aware of touch as an elusive but per-
vasive sensory faculty.37
The protective qualities of skin allow us to understand why The Allegory of Touch
is crowded, indeed obsessed, with armor. Eight suits of armor, arranged in three
rows, dominate the middle section of the painting. On closer inspection, we can
ascertain that the central row of armored torsos is actually a trompe l’oeil painting,
so realistic that it can be distinguished from its lower counterparts only by means
37 For a brilliant analysis of this awareness of sentience, see Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch.

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of touch. This display of artistic virtuosity would likely have summoned to the mind
of a Renaissance viewer Zeuxis’s celebrated painterly verisimilitude; it is precisely
that allusion that Sir John Davies evokes in Nosce teipsum, where he notes that
although animals might possess highly acute individual senses, the “quicke discours-
ing power” of human beings—intimately associated with the rational powers of the
soul—allows them to discern, as the birds and bees cannot, the difference between
painted grapes and flowers and real ones.38
The two lower groupings of armored figures are flanked by a pulled red curtain,
drapery that rhymes in its color and texture with the crimson fabric that covers the
otherwise naked Venus’s lap in the right foreground. The fabric’s contiguity with
Venus’s flesh makes its metonymical status apparent; just as skin with its ruddy tones
simultaneously covers and displays the body’s interior and its skeletal architecture,
so does the red cloth serve seductively both to reveal and to hide. In an analogous
way, armor becomes a prosthetic covering, duplicating the body’s swell of pectoral
and thoracic muscle in metallic form. Within the Derridean logic of the supplement,
armor initially works to augment the skin and musculature as the body’s natural
protection, but it then replaces this dermal envelope, standing as a substitute and
representation of that corporeal defense system. The animals in the painting (mon-
key, horse, dogs, tortoise, scorpions, birds) all exhibit what Crooke calls the “divers
coverings” that nature has given beastly creatures to defend themselves “and offend
others”: “shelles, rindes, haire, bristles, feathers, scales, fleeces, hornes, teeth, and
nailes.” Only human beings are born “naked and unarmed.”39 It is this fundamental
human vulnerability—accentuated in the painting’s display of skin—and its com-
pensatory ability to transform touch into the power of fashioning supplemental ar-
mored skin that the allegory celebrates. As Crooke says, the human body was born
naked so that it would not be tied to any particular form of protection; at “his own
wille and pleasure, both girt himselfe in all manner of armour, and againe presently
lay it aside.”40
Just above Venus’s head hangs an oval painting that depicts a dissection or med-
ical operation. Positioned on the table directly below this anatomical painting are
the medical instruments for opening the body and surveying its interior. The surgical
tools and two extracted teeth, commonplaces in the iconography of touch, signify the
barber-surgeon’s manual skill as well as the sensation of pain inevitably entailed by
early modern medical and dental operations. Our modern spelling of “surgeon” ob-
scures the etymology that Renaissance English made apparent: the spelling and pro-
nunciation of “surgeon” as “chirurgeon” activated the Greek etymon chir, “hand,”
a meaning still audible in our modern English term “chiropractor,” one who works
with the hands in order to cure disease.41
If, as Aristotle asserted, all living animals possessed the sense of touch, the hand
was the bodily instrument that distinguished the human from the animal, just as the

38 Davies, Nosce teipsum, 19.

39 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 9.
40 Ibid. For excellent studies of the skin, see Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004);

and Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World, trans. Thomas Dunlap
(New York, 2002; orig. German ed. 1999).
41 Oxford English Dictionary, entry and etymology for “chirurgeon.”

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faculty of reason differentiated men from beasts.42 Crooke saw the hand as a kind
of primal instrument and therefore the employer of all other tools, a progenitor of
humans’ artistic and artisanal abilities.43 Although human beings are born unarmed,
it is by means of their hands that they protect themselves; indeed, Crooke avers, it
is through the skill and defensive capabilities of the hand that all things are “brought
under our subjection and made tributary to us.”44 The “minister” of reason and the
“vicar” of speech is the hand; hands are the “interpreters of the secret Language of
our silent conceits,” signifying, as if “by Hieroglyphicks what the very thoughts of
our Heartes are.”45 John Bulwer, in Chirologia; or, The Naturall Language of the Hand
(1644), amplifies this idea, asserting that the hand is the “Spokesman of the Body,”
and that it therefore speaks a universal language that is understood by all.46
The hand’s expressive capacity makes it the bridge between soma and psyche,
body and reason, gesture and heart. Crooke asserts that its true office is “appre-
hending,” for he argues that “Hand and Holde are Conjungates,” that is, descended
from a common linguistic root.47 Although he glosses “apprehending” in the first
instance as seizing or laying hold of, the verb also means becoming conscious by
means of the senses. The hand is thus an instrument of sensible knowing, and al-
though the faculty of touch is distributed throughout the body, the hand possesses
exquisite sensitivity through its concentration of touch receptors. The early moderns
recognized the hand as a sensory tool so refined that it became a synecdoche of touch,
a quintessential signifier of the body’s capacity for sensory agency. Crooke called the
hand “the judge and discerner of the Touch,” asserting that even though touch is the
foundation of our “Animall Being,” “yet we do more curiouslie and exquisitely feele
and discerne both the first and second qualities which strike the Sense in the Hand
then in other parts.”48
The Allegory of Touch is full of references to hands as defensive, instrumental,
and erotic: the monkey in the lower right corner, for instance, usually an icon of taste
(itself a form of touch), is positioned among the surgical tools, one hand holding an
object and the other hand seeming to point, as if its dexterity could be extended from
an animal tactility into the instrumentality of the tool.49 Venus’s hands are prom-
inently intertwined with Cupid’s, a touch that dominates the right half of the paint-
ing. She clasps him in a maternal embrace that is both protective and amorous, and
he responds, touching her arm with one hand while the other rests on his quiver of
golden arrows. Conspicuous as the hands are in this embrace, the expanse of exposed
42 See Sherman, Writing on Hands, 141–142, for a fuller discussion of the history of the hand; Kath-

erine Rowe, “God’s handy worke,” in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies
of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1997), 284 –309, for an excellent analysis of the hand
in anatomical discourse; and Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity
from Michelangelo to Calvin (Leiden, 1998), for a study of the tradition that linked the instrumentality
of the hand with erect bipedal posture.
43 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 729. Appended to book VIII is a collection of philosophical and

anatomical controversies about the senses (646–726). The controversies, which elegantly summarize
many of the ancient and contemporary debates about the senses, are derived primarily from the work
of Julius Casserius Placentinus.
44 Ibid., 729.
45 Ibid., 730.
46 J.B. [John Bulwer], Chirologia; or, The Naturall Language of the Hand (London, 1644), 2–3.
47 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 730.
48 Ibid.
49 Louise Vinge, The Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition (Lund, 1975), 47–58.

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skin and the caress of breast and belly also display the dispersal of touch across the
body’s surface. The painting thus exhibits an alternation between the condensation
of tactility in the hand and its somatic distribution. The traffic between part and
whole is accentuated in the numerous suits of armor that noticeably lack one or both
hands. The gauntlet in the left foreground synecdochizes touch, figuring a compacted
tactility that is capable of exercising rational sovereignty over the skin’s dispersed
and vulnerable sensibility.50 As a dismembered or prosthetic limb, it testifies to the
hand’s symbolic power to be an instrument of the haptic, a defensive or offensive
weapon, and a tool that represents manual or artisanal work.
To the left of this anatomical painting hangs a depiction of The Flagellation of
Christ. The image is dominated by Christ’s exposed and excoriated skin, a display that
contrasts with the proximate lushness of Venus’s naked flesh just below it. Under-
neath The Flagellation, we see the instruments of scourging—the bundles of switch-
es—that were used to whip Christ, as if these material objects offered an ironically
“tangible” version of the merely visual and mimetic representation in the painting
within the painting, a way of translating the visual into the haptic. Contrasted to these
depictions of punishment and painful sensation that are always part of the iconog-
raphy of touch is Venus’s maternal, almost erotic, embrace of Cupid. This depiction
of tactility’s pleasure evokes Cesare Ripa’s verbal characterization of the sense of
touch in Iconologia, which features an allegorical female figure embracing a winged
putto.51 Cupid’s quiver of arrows and partially unfurled wings link him to the falcon
clutching its prey in its claws in the upper center of the painting; the falcon as a
conventional icon of touch transposes Cupid’s penetrative arrow into an erotic reg-
ister, alluding obliquely to a tradition that makes the falcon’s beak and talons a
proleptic representation of hymeneal rupture.52
Venus’s soft, fleshy nakedness and translucent skin contrast with the dark re-
flective surfaces of the armor and with the carapaced creatures that serve as emblems
of touch: the tortoise in the right foreground, with its gold-patterned shell, a visual
echo of the gilded peasecod breastplate; and the scorpion in the left foreground, with
its armored body and painful sting. The scorpion, the astrological sign that rules the
genitals, signifies the dangerous powers of sexual touch and the potential sting of
sexual disease.53 It figures genital or cutaneous vulnerability and the painful pen-
etration associated with its sting; its positioning under the heap of armor and weap-
ons gestures to its contradictory capacities for aggressive wounding, on the one hand,
and to the invulnerability of its panoplied body, on the other. As an arachnid, the
scorpion belongs to the same class of arthropods as the spider, which is the con-
ventional exemplar of touch, evident in such representations as the Wheel of the

50 For a more fully developed version of this argument, see my essay “The Touching Organ: Allegory,

Anatomy, and the Renaissance Skin Envelope,” in Elizabeth D. Harvey, ed., Sensible Flesh: On Touch
in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia, 2003), 81–102.
51 See Barbara Welzel’s reference in “Armoury and Archducal Image: The Sense of Touch from the

Five Senses of Jan Brueghel and Peter Paul Rubens,” in Luc Duerloo and Thomas Werner, eds., Albert
and Isabella, 1598–1621: Essays (Leuven, 1998), 99–106, 99. Her citation is to Cesare Ripa, Iconologia:
Overo descrittione di diverse imagini cavate dall’antichità, e di propria inventione (1603; repr., Hildesheim,
1984), 448.
52 Gilman, “Touch, Sexuality and Disease,” 206. Crispyn van de Passe the Elder’s The Seasons and

the Senses, pictured in Gilman’s essay (210), provides a useful example of this tradition.
53 Ibid., 210.

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398 Elizabeth D. Harvey

Senses at Longthorpe Tower.54 Cousin to the spider, the scorpion is even better
suited to the painting’s iconography, for its body is armored with chitinous plates,
hardened layers of cuticle or skin. The arthropod’s exoskeleton in effect turns the
body inside out, positioning its corporeal scaffolding on the outside. This perplexing
of inside and outside is one of the features of the history of touch. The dominance
of armor and weaponry in the painting, the trappings of Mars, offers a mediation
on the vulnerability of the human body, the relative fragility of its skin sheath, which
even as it provides protection is always simultaneously open to the assaults of tem-
perature, pleasure, and pain, to the wounds occasioned by armed conflict, and to the
erotic piercings of Cupid’s arrows.
The predominance of armor in the painting points to the system of analogy and
metonymy that forges connections between armor and skin. This conjunction is el-
oquently depicted in Valverde de Amusco’s illustration of the organs of the gas-
trointestinal system from his Anatomia del corpo humano (1588), in which the torso
of the cadaver is clothed in a suit of Roman armor. (See Figure 3.) The lorica mus-
culata, modeled on the Greek cuirass, with its detailed articulation of the male torso,
including not only musculature but sometimes also nipples and navel, was the armor
for the equestrian and senatorial ranks of Rome. The word “cuirass” derives from
the Latin corium and the French cuir, for the breastplate was originally fashioned
from leather. Although the term was subsequently used to describe metal armor, it
retained its etymological association with leather, flayed animal skin fashioned as a
supplemental covering for the human body. The irony of this metal or leather armor
is that its replication of the human skin’s details, nipples, navel, muscles, prosthet-
ically reproduces the vulnerability of sensation on the exterior even as it covers and
protects the fragile interior dermal sheath. Valverde’s anatomical engraving evokes
the protective properties of the human skin through its simultaneous representation
of the pteruges, the Roman warrior’s decorative skirt and feathered strips on the
shoulders, and through the absence of the cuirass or breastplate. Just as the corpse’s
missing head is transposed into the faces on the epaulettes, so is the body’s cutaneous
covering summoned through its metonymical association with the breastplate, whose
absence exposes the intestinal coils in the cadaver’s interior. The armored corpse
elicits the warrior’s vulnerability, the possibility that a wound in battle will pierce its
natural and prosthetic defenses, opening the thorax and transforming the soldier into
the cadaver that Valverde represents. The corpse’s armor may also refer obliquely
to the knowledge that anatomists, Galen in particular, gleaned about the interior of
the human body because of the wounds sustained in battle or gladiatorial combat.
But most importantly, Valverde gestures to the anatomical understanding of the skin
that saw it as the body’s protective envelope.
Rather than delineating the actual moment of Mars and Venus’s sexual trans-
gression, however, or the post-coital moment, as other artists did, Brueghel and
Rubens portrayed a suspension of possibility, with both ends of the tactile spectrum
balanced in the canvas. The depiction of Mars and Venus in The Allegory of Touch
is socially and culturally implicated through its attention to the guilds of armorers
and to fellow artists, who figure allusively in many of the paintings within the paint-

54 Vinge, The Five Senses, 51–53.

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FIGURE 3: Etching of the organs of the gastrointestinal system. From Juan Valverde de Amusco, Anatomia
del corpo humano (Rome, 1560), 95. Reproduced courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University
of Toronto.

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400 Elizabeth D. Harvey

ing.55 If the myth represents the extremes of touch, pain, and pleasure, it also cel-
ebrates Vulcan as the figure of the craftsman or artist. Represented both by the
artisanal craftsmen within the paintings and by the numerous self-reflexive refer-
ences to the craft of painting, Vulcan’s artistry portrays physical suffering and sen-
sual gratification, suspended as possibility in the spatial bifurcation of the picture
space and contained by the net of his manual skill.
55 For attribution of these paintings, see Welzel, “Armoury and Archducal Image,” 104 –105.

Elizabeth D. Harvey is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She

is the author of Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance
Texts (Routledge, 1992) and editor of a number of collections, including Sensible
Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press,
2003) and (with Theresa Krier) Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture: Thresholds
of History (Routledge, 2004). She is currently completing a book on souls in early
modern natural philosophy and literature.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2011