Het Geheugen van Geur

Het Geheugen van Geur is a collaboration between the KNAW Young Academy, Huygens Institute and the UU DURARE project to reconstruct a seventeenth-century fragrance created by Constantijn Huygens. Multi-disciplinary researchers from the humanities and sciences came together at the Utrecht ArtLab to follow Huygens’s recipe and distill a mixture of flower petals, spices, and herbs. In the blogpost “Making Scents of the Past” the DURARE team explains how we went about the reconstruction and discusses the importance of such laboratory work for historical research on durability. For the Dutch translation, see “Vervlogen Geuren Distilleren”.

The results of our experiments could be smelled during the exhibition Constantijn Huygens. Geuren en Beelden at the museum, Huygens’ Hofwijck, 6 April – 3 July 2022. Beyond the exhibition, you can still experience the scent in a candle that was produced on the basis of our historical reconstruction.