If you ever find yourself flagging in front of a Veronese painting, try playing a game of spot the dog. Let’s start with The Wedding at Cana, the whopping, operatic feast picture the artist made for the refectory of the Venetian monastery San Giorgio Maggiore. There! Peering down at Jesus through the balustrade is one pensive pooch. And another! In the bottom left corner, coming into the scene just as we are, curious about all the hubbub. Two more! At the very centre a couple of elegant greyhounds wait patiently, snouts pointing left and right. You guessed it. On the table, on the right hand side, is a tiny dog hungrily eyeing up scraps of food.
It was having a child that made me aware of the abundance of dogs in art (nothing like pointing out pups in paintings to get you through a gallery with a fidgety toddler). For the American cultural historian Thomas Laqueur it was having a dog of his own, which didn’t happen until he reached his forties (his first pet was a cat). Without that affective relationship, he writes, he’s not sure he would have noticed all the waggy tails and raised paws, the wet noses and watchful eyes in western art from classical antiquity to the present. In this charming and lavishly illustrated book he sets out to discover what the dogs do for the artists and how they do it.
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Spot the dog: there are five canines in The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese
First, he explains his choice of subject — why dogs rather than cats? Simple: because there are relatively few cats to be seen in art. As anyone who has owned a cat will know, they are independent and hard to pin down (and therefore to convince to pose). They are of their own world, unlike dogs, which “can’t help being there, being social, and paying close attention with their eyes to our every move”. Which is what, Laqueur writes, makes dogs in art unique: the way they see and are seen. In other words, their gaze.
Think of them as four-legged gallery guides, a helping hand (or paw) when it comes to looking at art. As well as framing devices, dogs draw us into a picture and generate a visual narrative. The pair bordering the central figure in Vittore Carpaccio’s Young Knight in a Landscape (1510) are “like theatregoers straining to see the action on stage”, while the upward gaze of the fuzzy little fellow in St Augustine in His Study (1502) points to the “indescribable light” bearing the news that Jerome has died. In Titian’s Diana and Actaeon (1556-59), the goddess’s lapdog is the first to notice the intrusion, yapping at the right-hand side of the painting, while opposite, Actaeon’s dog lifts its head, recognising before his master that something is horribly wrong.
Young Knight in a Landscape (1510) by Vittore CarpaccioVCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images
Titian’s Diana and Actaeon (1556-59)VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images
It’s true: the dog with the creamy-tipped tail trotting around off-lead in Caillebotte’s Le Pont de l’Europe (1876) is crucial to how the painting works, its line of sight drawing our eye along the length of the bridge and into the distance. It’s “doing the most serious looking, for the painter, for the painting, and for us”, Laqueur writes.
Le Pont de l’Europe (1876) by Gustave CaillebotteLeemage/Corbis via Getty Images
When it comes to portraits, they can help to “humanise the human”. The lady in red in Bronzino’s 1533 portrait of the same name might have wanted the smart little spaniel with her because it “reflects her sensibilities”: attentive, sweet, loyal. As for Titian’s portrait of Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, with a fluffy white Maltese… well, apparently Federico’s private life up until that point had been “less than exemplary”. During his first marriage he had a very public affair with a woman who was later poisoned and when the portrait was painted was in the process of negotiating a second marriage. Cue the devoted dog. As Laqueur wryly suggests, “Anyone who is this nice to a small dog who loves him can’t be the monster he might appear to be.”
The Dog’s Gaze is an enjoyable romp, although one that’s crying out for more humour. There are flickers — when he imagines that if a dog were writing this book, Laqueur ventures that it might be called “What the Dog Smells” — but not enough. Yes, the double portrait of the Bolognese painter Bartolomeo Passerotti and his pooch hugging each other on the front cover may be “a schematic of face-to-face gaze” and about “interspecies tenderness”, but isn’t it also funny? The way the animal’s neat whiskers mimic its master’s well-groomed moustache. The way the tips of their noses almost touch. The way the dog looks at the artist, and the artist turns to look at us, as if to say, “See? Somebody loves me.”
Laqueur may not come to the book from a lifetime love of dogs, but several of his subjects are known for their fondness of four-legged friends. Constantin Brancusi’s samoyed, Polaire, was with him when he worked and accompanied him to cafés. Lucian Freud, who populated his portraits with dogs from the beginning, said he was drawn to their “lack of arrogance, their ready eagerness, their animal pragmatism”. Of his beloved dachshund, Lump, Pablo Picasso claimed: “He’s not a dog, he’s a little man, he’s somebody else.” As for Paul Gauguin, he identified as a “rough, shaggy” dog himself.
We don’t know why Veronese was interested in dogs, but we do know that once he had imagined one in a painted scene there was no changing his mind. In 1573 he was called before the Inquisition and asked to remove the hound sitting at the centre of what was intended to be the Last Supper, painted for the prior of San Giovanni e Paolo. His defence of having used creative licence was ignored, and he was ordered to correct the painting, which after all ought to feature only things spiritual — “no jesters, no dogs, no weapons, or any such silliness”. Instead Veronese changed the name of the painting to The Feast in the House of Levi, transforming it from religious feast to relatively obscure dinner, to which anyone — even canines — might be invited.
The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History by Thomas W Laqueur (Allen Lane £35 pp400). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members