Veronese's Dogs

Attending to attentive canine figures in half a dozen paintings by Paolo Veronese, Thomas W. Laqueur explores the work of an artist whose love of dogs landed him in hot water with the Inquisition. Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.

Paolo Veronese, _Cupid with Two Dogs_, 1580, a “great heroic poem” — Source. The art historian Kenneth Clark thought that Veronese was “the greatest dog lover of the Renaissance”. We have absolutely no biographical evidence to support this claim but we do have the evidence of numbers: there are a great many dogs in Veronese’s paintings.1 And Clark could have gotten support of a different kind from the great nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin.

For Ruskin, Veronese’s dogs had a distinctive moral and social quality, which was especially prominent in one particular painting: _Cupid with Two Dogs_, a “great heroic poem”. Here, he wrote, two dogs are represented with the “highest, or spiritual view” of their nature: two magnificent mastiffs, “wildest of beasts perhaps they would have been by nature”. Between them is a beautiful boy, “golden quivered” — who represents, Ruskin thought, human love — holding the great beasts by a chain in his hands.

Love conquers savagery is how Ruskin interpreted the painting. But perhaps Cupid serves less as a stand-in for love (and its unpredictable nature) and more as a caretaker for these spectacular dogs, known for their steadfastness, who speak to a different kind of amorous union: one as faithful as dogs are to humans. The animals’ allegorical meaning, whatever it is, seems to me less important than the sweet intimacy with which the dogs are painted, grounded in their gaze and their sheer benign weightiness.

The one on the right looks quizzically and seductively out at us; the other, the more relaxed one on the left, looks with Cupid toward the painter outside the frame. Perhaps contemporary viewers would have seen them as having been once the “wildest of beasts” but they seem very far from that now. Visually they are the stars of the show in their almost psychedelically painted black-on-white spotted fur, their red tongues and glistening eyes like points of light.

The curves of their backs frame the bathed, soft flesh of the Cupid figure; the leg of the dog on the left is intertwined with his leg — he is astride of it — and touches the left paw of the other dog. All this in a severely constrained space, a vignette, that stands at one end of a scale, with Veronese’s great theatrical scenes (and their dogs) at the other. This is a formally virtuosic painting, whatever else it is about or means, about dogs, doggishness, and the gaze.