Veronese's Dogs

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. It would be a surprise, given his careful attention, if Veronese did not in fact love dogs.

Writing fifty years later, another art historian, also named Clark — T. J. this time — gets us closer to what they might mean to Veronese. His “attitude to earthly existence”, Clark suggests, “make[s] for a special kind of sympathy and tenderness where four-footed animals were concerned”. His case in point — the fluffy furred white and brown dog in the Happy Union of the fourth of the “Allegories of Love”, firmly grounded in the lower corner looking with big, wide-open eyes at Love herself — is a good but perhaps not a typical example. A dog in a great allegorical ceiling painting where it does not belong is funny in ways that dogs usually aren’t.²

The dogs in the Dresden version of The Adoration of the Magi are more typical of Veronese. The one on the lower left is “in thoughtful dialogue with the marvelous wooly lamb”, both absorbed in the ground they stand on, the lamb nosing around for food perhaps, the dog intrigued by whatever is going on if not talking to the shepherd’s lamb. Yet there are two other dogs in the painting that Clark does not mention but that are worthy of our attention: the brilliantly painted white one enveloped in the magenta cloak of one of the Magi, gazing out, as modest and humble as his master is grand. A down-to-earth creature. And just in front of this dog at the front edge of the painting is a third one, shaggy, brown and white, looking into the painting. These two dogs are a pair, an intimate encounter in a great spectacle: formally important in the structure of the painting but also — and because of that — loci of emotion. The white dog looks out patiently at us, resigned to waiting, quizzical and unknowing about the great event that the Magi and we are witnessing. It seems to stop or at least to slow time.

T. J. Clark asks his readers finally to look at the Turin version of Christ in the House of Simon the Pharisee as an example of the “kind of exchange between animal and human that goes on repeatedly in Veronese”. Luke 7:36–50 tells the story of Simon inviting Christ to his house. “A woman in the city, which was a sinner”, in other words a prostitute — often identified as Mary Magdalene — learns that Christ is there and comes to him weeping. She kisses and washes his feet and anoints him with ointment. Simon is appalled that Jesus allows this, and Jesus replies by saying that the woman — a sinner — treated him with respect while Simon failed to offer any of the signs of hospitality: “thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet”. To her Jesus says, “Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.” (Veronese added Mary and Martha from St John’s version of the Feast at the House of Lazarus and perhaps also, in the Turin version, the figure in yellow, who may be Judas protesting the waste of ointment.)

The dogs’ world mirrors that of the humans: as the Magdalene is washing Christ’s feet a dog is attending to its paws nearby. It emerges from under the tablecloth as if from behind a stage curtain, looking at the hand of Mary which is touching the fragrant ointment in the jar. Its brown fur emerges from the linen’s whiteness. Its right paw is but one tile’s distance from the shoeless left foot of the human. The other dog — the brown and white one — is “dignity itself, four legs planted firmly, its colour as the column behind it”. Its rear feet overlap the feet of the beggar and visually balance Mary on the same plane on the right. It looks over at the brown dog with a side glance at the anointing of the feet of Jesus.

That lower rectangle of the painting — the feet of the beggar, the dog looking past the intensely yellow cloak and at the Magdalene — is a virtuosic example of Veronese’s theatrical gifts, of how in even the grandest tableaus (this one is 4.1 x 4.7 metres) dogs humanize humans. Formally, they constitute the visual centre of a storm of action and look where we are meant to look. Two brightly painted humans are of course looking intensely at the main action — at Jesus — in the tableau to the right of the painting. But the white and brown dogs on the left are taking it all in as if Veronese were seeing like — or with — them, connecting the human with the animal world.

Veronese’s sympathy and tenderness toward dogs and his insistence on having them help us see through their eyes are most prodigally on display in The Wedding Feast at Cana, painted for the refectory of the monastery San Giorgio Maggiore. It is the only one of his feast pictures in which Jesus is performing a miracle — turning water into red wine — and not just dining: the divine immanent in the world. It is also the most wildly profane, operatic of Veronese’s feast paintings: a festival of eating and drinking and music-making luxuriantly set in sixteenth-century Cana. Dogs as formal elements in the structure bring the miracle down to earth; sweet, innocent, puzzled in their gaze, absorbed in the here and now. Grounded. Or to be more precise, they are grounded in the here and now of the human drama. Only the small one on the right arm of the table seems solely interested in the food.³

It is Veronese’s best-known and, at 6.8 x 9.75 metres, the largest of his paintings. The young General Napoleon showed ruthless good taste in art when, after his troops conquered Venice in 1797, he ordered it ripped from the walls of San Giorgio Maggiore and taken to Paris as war plunder, wrapped in a Titian, a Tintoretto, and two other Veroneses. It now hangs in the largest room of the Louvre, easy to view in a leisurely way because it is on a wall opposite the Mona Lisa, almost 200 times smaller, which draws the crowds to its side of the room.

A Cecil B. DeMille epic of a painting, it fills 75 square metres of canvas with 135 human characters, five dogs, and one cat, who may be playing with one mouse in a spectacular Roman classical setting. (In real life, before it was stolen, the painting had hung in a famous neo-classical building designed by Palladio.) It is vast also in reputation and influence: the Venetian painter and seventeenth-century engraver Marco Boschini said it was not just a painting but magic on canvas. It was studied and copied by generations of painters. Jacques-Louis David, the French Revolutionary painter, who saw the loot after it was installed in the Louvre, thought it “the greatest known picture in the world” and said that it inspired his Coronation of Napoleon.

Multiple dogs’ gazes frame the painting and look at the party from more angles than we can. Amid all the festivities and the halo on Christ they are its humble observers; self-contained; keeping company; witnessing. At the top left nearest the front plane of the painting is dog no. 1 looking down through the balustrade directly at Jesus; the humans further along are looking elsewhere except for a woman paired with the dog looking down from the other side. At the bottom left is dog no. 2: its head brown, its delicately painted chest white with brown spots; Veronese’s dog fur is a virtuoso performance. That dog is coming upon the scene just as we, its viewers, are too. It is half in and half out and seems to be looking both up at the black serving boy and over to the rest of the action, curious perhaps at what the hubbub is about. The bright white paint of its fur begins the swathe of white cloth a third of the way up that will take our eyes to the central figure. It is looking up at Jesus’ white shining face and invites us to join it.

Downstage centre are two more dogs — large greyhounds — nos. 3 and 4. They are at the viewer’s eye level and form the horizontal base of the painting as well as of its vertical axis. Together they hold down the floor. The nose of dog no. 3, the contemplative one, lying on the ground, resigned as dogs are to waiting patiently as its humans do what they do, is at the front edge of the canvas. Its nose is about to poke out. It is at the exact midpoint of the painting looking dreamily along the floor. Maybe it is glancing over at dog no. 2 entering, but really it has a look of being there, near asleep but still watchful, a quiet pose like that of the more famous dog in Dürer’s Melancholia I.

Its companion, dog no. 4, stands and looks to stage left. In contrast to that of its partner, it leans, straining on its lead, in that direction and invites us to move our eyes there. It may be looking over at the cat which, like most cats in Western art, is paying no attention to what humans are doing. Perhaps it is looking at the last dog in the painting as we scan left to right: the small one on the table intent on food. “Oh, if I could only pray”, Luther says of his dog Tölpel, “the way this dog watches the meat”. A dog in art is so often about attentiveness. There is also a vertical connection between that dog and the rest of the painting. The bow of the bass viol players looks almost like a lead; when our eyes follow it upward, they come to Christ, who is seated directly above the space between the two dogs.⁴

We in fact have almost no documentary evidence why any painter, and Veronese in particular, was interested in thinking with dogs. But we do in his case have a tantalizing small hint because on July 18, 1573, he was called before the Inquisition to answer questions about one of his paintings, specifically about a dog that figures prominently, front and centre.⁵

The Inquisitor asked if he had any idea why he had been summoned. Veronese replied that he did not although he speculated it might have been because the Inquisitors had summoned the Prior of San Giovani e Paulo who had commissioned a “Last Supper” from him as a replacement for a Titian on the same subject and “ordered him to have painted [in the picture] a Magdalen in place of a dog”. It had been more than three months since the painting had been finished; the dog was still there; no penitent prostitute had been added. Veronese confessed, that he had not done what they had ordered the Prior to order him to do. He told the Inquisitor that he would gladly do “everything necessary for my honour and for that of my painting”, but that he did “not understand how a figure of Magdalen would be suitable there”.

He had every reason not to understand. It is generally accepted that the painting in question was intended to be, as requested by the monastery, a Last Supper; we can identify it from all the detailed questions the Inquisitors asked and from its subsequent history. He might himself have caused some confusion by saying the painting was of the “Last Supper that Jesus Christ took with His Apostles in the House of Simon” when the Inquisitor asked what picture he was speaking about, although the Last Supper was neither at the house of Simon the Pharisee where the Magdalen story took place (Luke 7:36–50) nor of Simon the Leper (Mark 14:3–9) and Matthew 26:6–13) where Mary anointed Jesus. Veronese made no pretence in any of his feast scenes or other religious painting of faithfully illustrating a text. He was not unusual in this regard.

This was also not a Galileo moment: dogs in religious paintings did not threaten the teachings of the Church; there are plenty of them in paintings of The Last Supper. And they would be particularly appropriate in a commission from a Dominican monastery because of their well-known association with the order’s founder, St Dominic de Guzman. A black dog had announced to the saint’s mother “that she would bear in her womb a dog who, with a burning torch in his mouth and leaping from her womb, seemed to set the whole earth on fire”.⁶ She named her son after St Dominic of Silo, who had interceded on her behalf when she had failed to conceive. A dog with a torch in its mouth had already become in the late Middle Ages an iconographical sign for her son, the saint, in painting and sculpture for the order named after him and a logo until this day also for parishes named after the order’s founder. Everyone would know this. And, either in response to this story or independently much was made already in the Middle Ages of how the name of the order in Latin — Dominicanus — could easily be repurposed as Domini canis (“Dogs of the Lord”): dogs as the doppelgängers of the monks themselves, scurrying around corralling souls as in Andrea di Bonaiuto’s 1365 fresco Allegory of the Active and Triumphant Church.

But the problem was not, as Veronese first guessed, the presence of a dog instead of a Magdalen. In fact, he was not summoned in front of the Venetian Inquisition for heresy or even dubious iconography, although that charge was the ostensible subject of his trial. Veronese was collateral damage of local ecclesiastical politics, caught up in a struggle between Rome and Venice. The Inquisitor needed to prove himself to a new papal nuncio.⁷ In the context of the Counter-Reformation this painting could be construed as suspicious because of its indisputable theatrical extravagance; the Council of Trent had charged bishops with making sure that religious paintings were appropriately decorous and true to text.

Veronese’s only defence against this sort of attack — in addition to trying to claim he was no worse than Michelangelo in allowing his imagination full play — was a version of art for art’s sake: “We painters take the same licence the poets and the jesters take”. He filled the vast space of the canvas appropriately as his imagination dictated: his job was “to create the painting as I thought fit, it was large and could accommodate numerous figures”: “figures as ornaments, of my own invention”. The Inquisitor would have none of this. Everything in appropriate religious art, he was told, everything “befits the spiritual — there are no jesters, no dogs, no weapons, or any such silliness [as in yours]”. Veronese was ordered to “correct the painting” within three months.

In fact, all he did was put in a label where before there had been none. It read in the Latin of the Vulgate “Et fecit ei convivium magnum Levi in domo sua” (“Levi made the Lord a Great Feast”, Luke 5:29). A new name transformed Veronese’s Last Supper, in which soldiers and dogs and jesters might be regarded as sacrilegious and disrespectful, into a painting of a relatively obscure dinner with tax collectors and a great company of publicans at a rich man’s house to which Jesus had been invited.⁸ The Feast in the House of Levi, as the painting was now called, remained in the refectory of the priory for which it had been painted, watching over the monks as they ate, until it was moved to the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice in the nineteenth century.