In The Color of Angels, Constance Classen celebrates the richness of all that is unseen. More this-worldly than its title suggests, the book explores how the so-called “lower” senses (smell, touch, and taste) have shaped the religious and cultural imagination. Thus, Classen combines what one might call a “hidden history” of the other senses in European culture with a proposal for a broader sensory experience of the plastic arts. As with all hidden histories, there are culprits; and in this case the villain is modern Western culture’s love affair with all that is visual, from advertising and television to the aura of objectivity attached to visual perception. In response to the visualism of our age, Classen seeks to recover a fuller “aesthetic imagination,” by which she means one that “apprehend[s] and interpret[s] . . . the world through all the senses.” A social anthropologist by training, Classen is an astute interpreter of sensory symbolism, one who calls attention to the ways in which sensory cues can generate social and religious meaning. Over the past decade, her own fieldwork in Andean cultures has put her at the forefront of an emerging field known as the anthropology of the senses. Perhaps better...