The poet Marina Tsvetaeva said that she sinned ‘with all five senses’. And that is how Huizinga wrote. What he called ‘aesthetic observation’ was in reality synaesthetic. Take this sentence by Herodotus, which Huizinga quoted on numerous occasions in his work, about the battle of Salamis: ‘And when [Xerxes] saw the whole Hellespont hidden by ships, and all the beaches and plains of Abydos filled with men, he called himself happy – and the moment after burst into tears.’ Huizinga comments: ‘Instantly it appears before our eyes: the sun on the white sails, the teeming multitudes, the glint of armour and the patches of red clothing. We hear the sound of voices, and the splashing of waves, we taste the salty breeze.’ In other words: ‘seeing’ involves all the senses at once, ‘seeing’ stands for synaesthesia.

SIGHT

It would be hard to name a more sensual writer in the whole of Dutch literature, let alone in historiography. His strongest sense is that of sight. ‘I cannot recall when the idea took root in my mind,’ he writes in his memoirs, ‘that historical observation is best expressed as a view of, or better still as an evocation of, certain images.’ He had previously written that a historian does not just ‘draw the contours around the forms he designs, but colours them in with vivid detail and lights them up with visionary suggestion’.

Huizinga's visual sensitivity was highly developed, and he must have recognized a similar talent in the playwrights of ancient India. He quotes the visual metaphors he finds in their work with obvious delight: the vidûshaka's bald head, like ‘the knee of a young camel’, or the poor man himself, ‘bursting with the king's secret, like a dinner guest sated with exquisite dishes’, or the moon, ‘as red as the cheek of a pouting sweetheart’, or a buffalo, ‘its muffled snorting like that of an affronted dandy’. Then there is the butcher's boy who rinses tripe ‘as if it was an old skirt’. The historian went to work in the same way. When writing his studies of Haarlem as a young man, he was already concerned with whether readers could ‘form a picture of what is reconstructed historically’.