Kenneth Clark called Paolo Veronese “the greatest dog lover of the Renaissance” — a claim with no biographical evidence behind it and a great deal of painted evidence in front of it. Thomas W. Laqueur’s essay, excerpted from his new book The Dog’s Gaze, reads the dogs in half a dozen Veronese paintings as something more than decoration.

Luther said of his dog Tölpel: “Oh, if I could only pray the way this dog watches the meat.” For Laqueur, that is what a dog in art is usually about — attentiveness. Veronese’s dogs watch the sacred event the way we are meant to.

The catalogue is a tour of the painter’s range:

  • Cupid with Two Dogs (1580), which Ruskin read as a “great heroic poem” about love taming savagery — two mastiffs, “wildest of beasts perhaps they would have been by nature,” held by a golden-quivered boy
  • The Adoration of the Magi (1571, Dresden), where one dog is “in thoughtful dialogue with the marvelous wooly lamb” and another, wrapped in a Magi’s magenta cloak, “stops or at least slows time”
  • Christ in the House of Simon the Pharisee (ca. 1556, Turin), where the dogs mirror the human drama — as the Magdalene washes Christ’s feet, a dog attends to its own paws one tile away
  • The Wedding Feast at Cana (1562–63): 75 square metres of canvas, 135 human characters, five dogs and one cat, each gaze opening a different angle onto the miracle

The Cana is the largest of his paintings and among the most looted. Napoleon’s troops took Venice in 1797 and had it ripped off the wall of San Giorgio Maggiore, wrapped in a Titian, a Tintoretto, and two other Veroneses. It now hangs in the largest room of the Louvre, opposite the Mona Lisa — almost two hundred times smaller, and drawing all the crowds. Jacques-Louis David called it “the greatest known picture in the world.”

Then there is the matter of the 1573 summons. Veronese was called before the Venetian Inquisition over a dog painted front and centre in a Last Supper commissioned by a Dominican monastery. He guessed the problem was the dog; Laqueur shows it was not. The painting was collateral in a struggle between Rome and Venice, and between Counter-Reformation rules about decorum in religious art and an artist who worked by his own invention.

His defence was essentially art for art’s sake, four centuries early: “We painters take the same licence the poets and the jesters take.” The Inquisitor was unimpressed — “there are no jesters, no dogs, no weapons, or any such silliness” — and ordered the painting corrected within three months.

The dog was, in any case, an odd thing to object to in a Dominican house. Dominicanus was read as Domini canis: the Dogs of the Lord. St Dominic’s mother dreamed she bore a dog carrying a burning torch that would set the world alight, and the image stuck in the order’s art for centuries.

Laqueur’s verdict is modest and convincing. It would be a surprise, given the careful attention, if Veronese did not in fact love dogs.