In 2015, the Museo del Prado mounted a small and unusual exhibition. It was titled Hoy toca el Prado and consisted of six paintings from the collection reproduced in relief, with textures and volumes of up to six millimetres, so that they could be traversed with the hands: a Velázquez, a Goya, a Greco, a Correggio, a still life by Van der Hamen, and the Mona Lisa from Leonardo's workshop. Three of them were life-sized. Alongside each one, there was an audio guide, braille, and a guided path for the hands. It remained open for nine months and has since travelled through half of Spain.
Major museums now maintain similar programmes. The Metropolitan offers verbal description tours and a specific collection that may be touched. The MoMA operates a programme based on description and conversation. The Louvre publishes braille booklets that include dimensions and material samples. Tate organises monthly tactile tours of three works. It is a consolidated field, supported by standards, professional guides, and significant research.
I could write about this in a celebratory tone; it would be an easy and rather futile text. I am interested in something else: what this work reveals about a question that is not one of accessibility, but of substance. What exactly it means to perceive a work of art. For centuries we have taken for granted that it means to see it, and these programmes compel us to verify whether that is true.
The obvious temptation is to think that relief provides a translation: that if a painting is converted into volume, the hand receives what the eye would receive. And it is precisely there that research and testimonies coincide in stating that it does not. Georgina Kleege, a writer, university professor, and blind person, wrote something important in a Tate publication that is worth citing because it comes from someone who possesses the experience rather than someone who assumes it: that many tactile tours fail precisely because they assume a perfect analogy between the touch of a blind person and the sight of a sighted person, as if placing a hand on a surface automatically generated a mental image. She adds something more unsettling: that such visits often make participants feel rushed, exposed, and uncertain about what they are supposed to derive from the experience.
Empirical research points in the same direction, without drama. Identifying a line drawing in relief proves difficult, with low success rates and long durations, because touch gathers information sequentially and fragmentarily: there is no tactile equivalent to a glance; there is a journey that must subsequently be integrated. Matters improve significantly with texture rather than line, with prior verbal context, and with practice. Furthermore, studies suggest that, at times, a cutout communicates a form more effectively than a relief, which dismantles the intuition that merely lifting a drawing from a plane is sufficient.
This signifies something that is not what it seems. It does not state that touch is a poor substitute for sight. It states that touch is not a spare form of sight: it is another mode of access, with its own conditions, and to evaluate it by its resemblance to vision is to measure it with a standard that does not apply. The error does not lie in the hands. It lies in the assumption that the only legitimate way to receive a work of art is the one that the majority of us possess.
Once that assumption is removed, the interesting aspect emerges. A recent study interviewed twenty-one people with acquired blindness as they explored a Castellani surface with their hands, and documented how, following an initial difficulty in interpreting the stimulus, imagination, personal memories, and the construction of meaning appeared. That is not the recognition of a figure; it is an aesthetic experience, of the same nature that anyone would describe when confronted with a work that resonates with them. There was no translation of the image. There was an encounter with a surface, which is, at its core, what is always present.
Audio description reveals the same tension from the other side. Best practice dictates describing what is perceptible rather than interpreting: one should not state that a woman is sad, but rather that she is reading a letter, lets it fall, and covers her face. The rule is sound, for to interpret on behalf of another is to deprive them of the work. Yet in a museum, this line is impossible to maintain entirely: choosing what to describe first, what to mention, and what to omit constitutes an interpretation in itself. There is no neutral description, just as there is no neutral lighting. What the guidelines require, when properly understood, is not an impossible objectivity, but rather not closing off the work: providing sufficient material for the other to interpret, rather than delivering the interpretation pre-formed.
And that is where this matter ceases to be an issue of accessibility and becomes an issue for everyone. Because exactly the same reproach can be levelled at a label before a painting, an audio guide in the ear of a sighted visitor, or a critic who explains a work before one has had time to look at it. There, too, the risk is to substitute the encounter for its already digested version. Accessibility does not pose a separate problem; it poses, with greater clarity because it cannot conceal it, the perennial problem.
I am left with what accessibility teaches without intending to. That there is no privileged channel that delivers the work in its entirety, not even our own. That viewing a painting is also a partial access, conditioned by light, distance, fatigue, what we know, and what we expect. And that asking what is lost when a painting is traversed with the hands compels us to ask, immediately afterwards, what is lost when it is traversed with the eyes; it is a question we almost never ask ourselves because we take for granted that nothing is missing there.
About the open conversation
This text does not speak on behalf of anyone: it is supported by documented programmes, peer-reviewed research, and published testimonies from blind individuals, and its question is not how others perceive, but what accessibility reveals about what it means to perceive a work. It is a matter I have been working on from another angle, that of whether human perception is the yardstick by which to measure any other mode of access. If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspective of museum accessibility, audio description, research into haptic perception, or personal experience as a visitor, this notebook remains open, and in this instance, with greater cause.
Sources
Museo Nacional del Prado. Hoy toca el Prado (20 January – 18 October 2015). Relief reproductions using the Didú technique (Estudios Durero).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA (Art inSight), Smithsonian American Art Museum (America InSight), Musée du Louvre, and Tate: programmes for blind and low-vision visitors.
Kleege, Georgina. Tate Etc., 8 September 2022.
Vinter, A., Orlandi, O. and Morgan, P. “Identification of Textured Tactile Pictures in Visually Impaired and Blindfolded Sighted Children”. Frontiers in Psychology, 2020.
Kalia, A. et al. Multisensory Research, 2014 (reliefs versus cut-outs in the communication of form).
Uboldi, S. et al. (2025). Study on the tactile aesthetic experience of people with acquired blindness regarding the work of Enrico Castellani.
Li, F. et al. Proceedings of CHI 2023 (interviews and survey on access to visual art).
ADLAB (2011-2014); VocalEyes; American Council of the Blind, Audio Description Guidelines and Best Practices (v3.1, 2010).