Picture the scene. Florence, 1538. In Titian’s studio, a young woman lies naked on a bed of crimson silk, her gaze provocative, her hand brushing her sex with studied nonchalance. At her feet, a small white dog sleeps, curled into a ball of immaculate fur. This detail, almost incidental, is in fact
By Artedusa
••11 min read
The dog in art: when loyalty becomes a work
Picture the scene. Florence, 1538. In Titian’s studio, a young woman lies naked on a bed of crimson silk, her gaze provocative, her hand brushing her sex with studied nonchalance. At her feet, a small white dog sleeps, curled into a ball of immaculate fur. This detail, almost incidental, is in fact a symbolic bombshell. In Renaissance iconography, the dog embodies marital fidelity—but here, placed at the feet of a lascivious Venus, it becomes the silent witness to an impending betrayal. Is it an ironic reminder of a wife’s duties? A mockery of convention? Or simply the model’s pet, slipped in by chance? Art historians still debate the matter. One thing is certain: this sleeping dog has crossed centuries, becoming far more than a mere accessory—an enigma, a symbol, a key to understanding the mores of an era.
For the dog, in art, has never been a simple decorative motif. It is the mirror of our contradictions: at once guardian of hearths and symbol of debauchery, marker of social status and companion of the humblest, sacred creature and scapegoat. Its artistic history is one of perpetual metamorphosis, where each era has projected onto it its obsessions, its fears, its desires. Follow this trail through the centuries, and it is the whole history of humanity that reveals itself—through the prism of a canine gaze.
Anubis of the pharaohs: when the dog guarded eternity
We must return to the sands of ancient Egypt to grasp the dog’s first sacred incarnation in art. In the tombs of Saqqara, around 2400 BCE, frescoes depict dogs with pricked ears, resembling greyhounds, accompanying their masters into the afterlife. But it is with Anubis, the jackal-headed god, that the dog ascends to divinity. Egyptian artists rendered him with astonishing anatomical precision: elongated muzzle, slender body, tail curled into a perfect arc. The pigments used—red ochre for the fur, carbon black for the contours—were chosen to withstand the test of time, as if the dog’s representation, too, had to defy death.
Why such veneration? The Egyptians saw the dog as an intermediary between worlds. Anubis, god of embalmers, guided souls to the afterlife and weighed the hearts of the dead. Living dogs, meanwhile, were buried with their masters in specially designed necropolises, like that of Asyut, where more than eight million canine skeletons have been found. These animals were not mere companions: they embodied loyalty pushed to its extreme, a fidelity that survived death. Egyptian artists, by depicting them with near-photographic realism, captured this essence—a promise of eternity.
This sacralization of the dog appears in other ancient civilizations. In Greece, the myth of Actaeon, transformed into a stag and devoured by his own hounds for having spied on Artemis bathing, reveals another facet of the animal: that of the merciless executioner. Attic vases from the fifth century BCE depict these scenes with raw violence, the dogs’ fangs tearing into the flesh of their former master. Here, the dog is no longer a benevolent guide but the instrument of divine vengeance—a duality that would haunt Western art for millennia.
The court dog: the accessory worth its weight in gold
In the Middle Ages, the dog left temples and tombs to take up residence in castles. In the illuminations of Books of Hours, like that of Jeanne d’Évreux (circa 1325), it can be seen frolicking at the feet of noblewomen, tiny, with silky fur, often held on a silk leash. These companion dogs—dwarf spaniels or bichons—were not mere pets: they were social markers, as precious as a jewel or a brocade gown.
Medieval hunting treatises, like Gaston Phoebus’ Book of the Hunt (14th century), meticulously distinguished breeds and their uses. Greyhounds, lean and swift, were reserved for the nobility’s deer hunts; mastiffs, massive and powerful, guarded seigneurial domains. The era’s artists, often anonymous, reproduced these distinctions with an almost obsessive attention to detail. In the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (circa 1410), a small white dog with bright eyes accompanies the duke in a January scene, symbolizing both his status and his humanity—for at that time, owning a dog was also a way of displaying one’s capacity to love.
But this affection came at a price. Court dogs were often given as diplomatic gifts, like luxury objects. In 1514, King Henry VIII of England received from Charles V a pair of small white dogs, likely Maltese bichons, accompanied by a letter specifying their value: "more precious than gold." Renaissance artists like Bronzino and Titian immortalized these exchanges in portraits where dogs, strategically placed at their masters’ feet, served as foils. In Portrait of Eleonora of Toledo (1545), Bronzino depicts the duchess with her son Giovanni, a small white dog sleeping at their feet. The message is clear: this family embodies power, beauty, and fidelity—virtues that the dog, by its mere presence, seals.
Yet behind this idyllic image lies a less flattering reality. Court dogs were often mistreated, force-fed to meet the era’s beauty standards, or abandoned when they became too cumbersome. Artists, by idealizing them, participated in this mythology—transforming real animals into pure symbols, stripped of their animality.
The dog and the mirror: when art reveals our hypocrisies
It was in the seventeenth century that the dog became a true actor in painting, a character in its own right who spoke volumes about those around it. In Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), a Spanish mastiff dozes in the foreground, indifferent to the courtly ballet unfolding around the Infanta Margarita Teresa. This dog, painted with remarkable economy—just a few strokes of brown and white to suggest its thick coat—is far more than a decorative element. It embodies the stability of a Spanish monarchy then on the brink of decline, an anchor in a rapidly changing world.
By placing the dog at the center of the composition, Velázquez plays with the viewer’s expectations. At the time, royal portraits were meant to showcase grandeur and power—yet here, an animal, a symbol of fidelity but also of submission, steals the spotlight from the kingdom’s most important figures. Some historians see in this a veiled critique of the Spanish court, where appearances mattered more than reality. Others interpret it as the artist’s own assertion: by depicting himself in the painting, Velázquez places himself on equal footing with the king—and the dog, occupying the central space, becomes the true subject of the work.
This ambiguity appears in other paintings of the era. Among the Dutch, dogs in genre scenes took on a moral dimension. In Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (1658), a small white dog, barely sketched, stands near the servant. Its gaze, directed at the viewer, seems to ask: What are we doing here, spying on this intimate scene? With Jan Steen, dogs become outright comic characters, as in The Happy Family (1668), where a spaniel steals a sausage from under the table, symbolizing the temptations that beset mankind.
But it is perhaps among the Flemish painters that the dog best reveals our contradictions. In Frans Snyders’ The Hunting Dog (1640), a spaniel with sad eyes stares at the viewer, while in the background, servants prepare a meal. Here, the dog is no longer a symbol of fidelity or status but a metaphor for the human condition: at once domesticated and wild, useful and superfluous, loved and sacrificed.
The cursed dog: Goya and the darkness of the soul
While the eighteenth century made the dog a salon companion, the nineteenth century turned it into a mirror of our anxieties. No one captured this transformation better than Francisco Goya, whose Black Paintings (1819–1823) rank among the most disturbing works in art history. In The Dog, a canvas painted directly onto the walls of his house, the Quinta del Sordo ("House of the Deaf"), a dog barely emerges from an ochre background, its eyes wide, as if being sucked into the void around it. There is no master, no landscape, not even ground beneath its paws—just a desolate expanse, an absence that induces vertigo.
Interpretations of this work abound. Some see an allegory of Spain under Napoleon’s yoke, others a metaphor for Goya’s own loneliness, deaf and reclusive in his final years. Here, the dog is no longer a symbol of fidelity but of despair—a creature abandoned, condemned to wander in a world that has lost all meaning. The technique itself contributes to this sense of unease: Goya used thin, almost transparent layers of paint, as if the dog were dissolving into nothingness.
This dark vision of the dog appears in other nineteenth-century artists. In Théodore Géricault’s shipwreck scenes, like The Raft of the Medusa (1819), dogs become helpless witnesses to human madness. In Gustave Courbet’s The Black Dog (1842), the animal, painted with an almost impressionistic touch, seems to embody the artist’s own melancholy. Even among the Romantics, like Eugène Delacroix, the dog loses its innocence: in The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), a greyhound, indifferent to the massacre unfolding around it, symbolizes selfishness and decadence.
Why this shift? The nineteenth century was an era of upheaval—industrial revolutions, rapid urbanization, the questioning of traditional values. The dog, once a symbol of order and stability, became a reflection of these anxieties. It was no longer a guardian but a survivor—or worse, a victim.
The modern dog: from Picasso to Banksy, the animal that watches us
In the twentieth century, the dog left salons and battlefields to enter art galleries—and our imaginations. Pablo Picasso, who shared his life with a dozen dogs (including the famous dachshund Lump, who slept in his bed and ate at his table), made them a recurring motif in his work. In The Dog (1957), a linocut with pared-down lines, Lump is reduced to his simplest form: two eyes, a muzzle, a tail. Yet this very simplicity makes it an icon—a testament that art can arise from the most ordinary love.
For the Surrealists, the dog became a dreamlike figure. In Salvador Dalí’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1946), dogs with elongated legs, half-angel, half-demon, surround the saint in a danse macabre. For Dalí, the dog was a hybrid creature, at once familiar and monstrous, capable of revealing our most repressed desires. In Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey and Dog (1942), the hairless itzcuintli dog embodies the connection between the artist and her pre-Columbian roots—a fidelity to oneself, in short.
But it is perhaps in contemporary art that the dog takes its revenge. Jeff Koons, with his Balloon Dogs (1994–2000), turns the animal into a mass-consumption object, an ironic nod to our obsession with status symbols. Banksy, meanwhile, makes it a political actor: in Napalm (2004), he reinterprets the famous Vietnam War photograph by replacing American soldiers with Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald, while a dog in the foreground seems to howl in pain. Here, the dog is no longer a symbol of fidelity but of resistance—a reminder that even in the darkest moments, humanity can still be saved.
The dog and us: what these gazes tell us
Looking back through art history, one question arises: why has the dog, more than any other animal, inspired so many artists? Perhaps because it is the only one that truly looks at us. In Las Meninas, Velázquez’s mastiff stares at the viewer with royal indifference. In Goya’s The Dog, the animal seems to beg us to reach out. In Picasso’s work, Lump watches us with silent complicity. These gazes, at once familiar and mysterious, reflect our own humanity—or its absence.
The dog, in art, is far more than a motif. It is a language. A code that each era has used to speak of itself, of its dreams and its nightmares. Fidelity, lust, social status—these themes are mere pretexts. What artists have truly sought to capture, through the dog, is that unique relationship that binds us to another species: a story of love, betrayal, dependence, and freedom.
So the next time you encounter a dog in a museum, don’t just admire it. Look it in the eye. And ask yourself: what does it see in us?
The dog in art: When loyalty becomes a work | Art History
