The cat’s senses are not an enhanced version of our own: they are a different system for reading the world. Imagining them is an act of listening and attention, a way to suspend our point of view and, even if only for a moment, access another perception of reality.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote: “The smallest feline, the cat, is a work of art.” With Anatomia Felina, this insight takes visual form, focusing attention on the cat’s body as the intersection of scientific wonder and artistic imagination.
Sabrina Risuleo’s digital watercolour illustrations focus on details usually found in specialised study, revealing the feline sensory system as a perfectly integrated whole. The exhibition unfolds across five fundamental areas: smell, taste, hearing, sight, and touch. Five “superpowers” that explain why the cat does not simply inhabit space, but anticipates it, interprets it, and masters it.
A graduate in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and in Anatomical Drawing from “La Sapienza” University, Sabrina Risuleo builds her practice on a dialogue between scientific observation and artistic interpretation. Her images give form to the invisible, revealing how the cat’s sensory complexity is the key to its extraordinary perceptual abilities.
Anatomia Felina thus invites us to look beyond the domestic dimension of the cat, and to recognise it as one of the most accomplished examples of biological evolution: an organism in which structure, function, and sensory abilities achieve a rare and surprising balance.
Smell
For the cat, smell is the guiding sense
The cat possesses a far greater number of olfactory receptors than humans (around 200 million compared to our 5 million) and uses scents to recognise individuals, mark boundaries, interpret emotional states, and read the environment.
The Jacobson’s organ
While humans rely primarily on sight to navigate the world, the cat builds an invisible map made of chemical signals. Through the vomeronasal organ (Jacobson’s organ), located in the roof of the mouth, it intercepts information that does not exist to us as smells, but which for the cat are actual messages.
This is why, at times, the cat curls its upper lip and remains motionless: it is performing the flehmen response, a kind of olfactory “tasting.”
Taste
Taste of selection
For humans, taste is about experience, pleasure, and narrative. Sweetness holds a central role in our diet and culture. The cat, however, experiences taste in an essential way: it cannot perceive sweetness and has a much smaller number of taste buds compared to humans. Instead, it is highly sensitive to bitter flavours and the chemical components of meat.
A small evolutionary masterpiece
A cat’s papillae, made of keratin and curved like tiny hooks, allow it to groom its coat, rasp meat from bones, and even transport water into the mouth.
Hearing
The cat’s ears are sophisticated parabolic antennas
With 32 muscles per ear, a cat can rotate each pinna independently, capturing sounds from any direction with extraordinary precision. Human hearing has clear limits: beyond a certain threshold, sound disappears. Cats hear much farther. Frequencies that do not exist for us become useful signals: traces of movement or signs of presence.
A natural radar
Inside the ear, the cochlea and ossicles transform vibrations into detailed neural signals. The result is fine, selective, directional hearing: a natural radar for hunting, exploring, and navigating the environment with confidence. Cats can localise a sound in less than the blink of an eye. Silence, as we understand it, is not empty for a cat: it is a populated space, rich with information that guides behaviour.
Sight
The cat’s super-vision
A cat’s eyes are designed for hunting in low light. Its vertical pupils can dilate into wide apertures to let in maximum light, while the retina is rich in rods, cells sensitive even to minimal illumination. In low-light conditions where the human eye loses information, cats continue to orient themselves confidently. Shapes remain legible, movement readable.
The tapetum lucidum, a reflective structure behind the retina, further amplifies light; this is why cats’ eyes glow in the dark. Colour vision is more limited than ours, but their perception of movement is extraordinary. Their wide field of vision and rapid focusing ability help cats pinpoint prey even when it moves at high speed.
Touch
Whiskers, Skin, and Paws: A Sensor System
Touch is one of the cat’s most refined senses, thanks to vibrissae (whiskers), skin receptors, and the sensitivity of the paws. Vibrissae are not common hairs: each follicle is packed with nerves and blood vessels, turning them into sensors that measure space, detect imperceptible movements, and guide hunting, especially in the dark. They detect air currents, distances, and obstacles, providing information without the need for direct contact.
Every Step Reads Reality
The paws complete this system, sensing textures, vibrations, and micro-movements in the ground. Together, whiskers and paws allow the cat to read its surroundings with millimetric precision, transforming every surface into information and every step into exploration. While humans explore space primarily through sight and hands, the cat “reads” it in advance, turning every movement into a measured choice.
