For me, perfumery is an art itself. In the '60s, a perfumer called Edmond Roudnitska said that perfumery is an art and it's between sculpture and music. It's like music because as perfumers we speak about notes, accords, and composition, and when we describe a perfume we can give them shapes. It can be a square, round, velvety, sharp, or metallic. Here we merged two arts: painting and perfume. Research has shown that you remember something better if you are smelling at the same time as seeing, so it's a good idea to combine the two.

— Puig perfumer Gregorio Sola on creating the fragrances for Museo Nacional del Prado's scented installation for the painting The Sense of Smell, by Jan Brueghel (see post from April). Read more in Gregorio Sola, Senior Perfumer At Puig, On Crafting Scents For Public Spaces at BeautyMatter.

The fruits of his labour can be sampled from the four diffusers that sit in room 83 of the Prado, delivering their carefully calibrated perfumes at the touch of a screen. As well as jasmine, rose, spikenard, fig tree, orange blossom, daffodil, a bouquet of rose, jasmine and carnation, there is iris – and kid gloves scented with amber.

While Sola opted not to conjure up the smell of the guinea pigs, the peacocks or the hound who has muzzled his way into the picture, he did recreate the scent of the civet who lies coiled in its bottom right-hand corner. Puig’s diffusers dispense a hot stinky hit of civet, which, thankfully, soon fades out.

— Gregorio Sola, Puig’s senior perfumer, creates fragrances for the painting The Sense of Smell, by Jan Brueghel and Rubens. Read more in Prado creates palette of odours to make scents of Brueghel painting at The Guardian. The installation runs through July 3. Below the jump, a 10 minute video from the Museo Nacional del Prado, with English subtitles…

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