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Bartolomeo Passerotti, Portrait of a Man with a Dog, 1585-87. Capitoline Museum, Rome.
There are dogs, prominent but often unnoticed, in the canonical works of western art and in thousands of lesser masterpieces, more by far than of any other animal. Indeed they figure in art going back to the Paleolithic age.
In his new book The Dog’s Gaze, cultural historian and author Thomas W Laqueur explores why and what they are doing there. They organize the visual space of an image and the ways we are asked to respond to it: they point to things, they tell us where to look, they make connections between things in the image and gesture to us as the observers. They are sometimes uncanny doubles for the artist, sometimes for us as viewers. They humanize humans. The dog’s capacity to do all this is grounded in deep time, when the proto grey wolf evolved into the proto dog with a gaze, a meeting of eyes, that bound them to us.
The Dog’s Gaze by Thomas W Laqueur is published by Allen Lane.
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