What Dogs See When They Look at Us

Laqueur takes the reader on a nearly encyclopedic trip through this truth and its consequences, ranging from Giotto’s dogs—calm, disengaged witnesses to holy stories (“At a foundational moment of Western art,” he says, “there is the dog doing what dogs do”)—to Bruegel the Elder’s massed and happy hunting hounds in winter, whose barks we can almost hear penetrating the bitter cold, and to Degas’s chin-lifted greyhound crossing the Place de la Concorde, as alienated as an urban dandy. Laqueur also has something rare, though essential to real scholarship, and that is taste. When he says, in effect, “Good dog!,” he’s right. He recognizes, for instance, that, in the late Quattrocento and beyond, the painters of Venice are the most sensitive to his subject. That might seem surprising for a maritime city where no one could hunt or chase wild animals. But perhaps this is part of the explanation: when dogs are not mainly servants, they can be seen more readily as subjects.

Several pages of “The Dog’s Gaze” are devoted to the most memorable little dog in art, the one in Carpaccio’s late-Quattrocento painting of St. Augustine in his beautiful Venetian study. The Maltese—who watches his master as the translucent apparition of St. Jerome appears at his study window—is alert and attentive without being capable of complete apprehension. We are reminded of dogs as an intermediary between mankind and the rest of creation, both sublunary and celestial; dogs remind us daily of our animal selves and are audience to our higher moments. Laqueur ignores, though, a small but significant fact in this scene: the Maltese is facing, directly across it in the tiny Venetian chapel where the picture lives, an image of St. George defeating a dragon, and the path from dragon to dog is surely the implicit subject of the chapel’s iconography. The good life is a procession from the dragon who lives within us to the dog who barks beside us.

Among the Venetians who came after Carpaccio, Titian, too, gets his due in “The Dog’s Gaze,” while Veronese, whom Kenneth Clark considered the greatest dog-lover of the Renaissance, enters in the episode in which, having placed dogs alongside dwarfs and clowns in his “Last Supper,” he was summoned by the Inquisition and forced to explain himself. Though Laqueur insists that this was not “a Galileo moment,” it was still charged: the presence of dogs made for a vulgar atmosphere in a divine setting. Significantly, Veronese did not argue, as a contemporary art historian might on his behalf, that dogs were symbols of fidelity or faith. He admitted that they were just dogs being doggy, then shrugged and changed the painting’s name from “The Last Supper” to “The Feast in the House of Levi,” an obscure incident in the Gospel of Luke but one genre-like enough to pass as a mere scene of everyday life. (Though, as Veronese perhaps knew, this is the episode where Jesus defends his dining with publicans and sinners, which might justify the mixed company in the painting.)

Dogs in Renaissance art are faithful but not divine. Their symbolic role is usually secondary to their real presence. Laqueur points out a disturbing, unforgettable instance of this in Titian’s “Flaying of Marsyas”: as Apollo skins the satyr alive for challenging him to a music contest and then losing it, a small dog eagerly laps up the spilled blood. The enduring animalness of the dog (Lucian Freud called it “animal pragmatism,” explaining why he wanted his people to resemble dogs) is one reason that the species can never be simply inducted into piety.

Indeed, there are aspects of a dog’s existence which resist crossing over into art. An inordinate amount of the time we spend with our dogs deals with defecation. We become as acclimated to their moods and needs in this direction as we are to our own. We even spend, in New York, much of our days with small plastic bags in hand, in a beautiful demonstration, which Adam Smith would have loved, of the delicate dance of both social obligation (there’s a law!) and social sympathy (no one enforces the law but the participants in the practice it governs). The exception to this pattern of absence seems to be Rembrandt, whose etching “The Good Samaritan” includes a large, defecating hound. The Met’s catalogue says that this is just a vulgar detail, but one suspects a poetic purpose here as well. The pragmatic dog is true to its nature and does not care about doing what it does where it does it. The man in the etching, the Good Samaritan, can transcend his nature, his inherent tribalism, and offer loving aid to one not of his own kind. (Or, perhaps, the Samaritan is following his true inner nature, the call to be kind, as the dog is answering its own call of nature?)