A meditation on the presence of dogs in art, from the Paleolithic era to the present, and what our intertwined human-canine relationship reveals about human nature.
I’m still haunted by our ailing, elderly dog’s large, trusting, liquid eyes looking out at us in the moments before her death ... That gaze is one I will never forget, and I turned to a new book on that very subject, Thomas W. Laqueur’s wonderful The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History, with shivering gratitude ... Laqueur wants to tell us why dogs matter, demystifying his subject while respecting its mystique ... Laqueur’s book has no particular thesis to hobbyhorse for, and yet a unified-field theory of aesthetic dogginess might be distilled from its pages.
The book starts in the deep past and goes to the present, surveying much of the science and philosophy of the human-dog relationship. But Laqueur’s chief interest lies in the Western pictorial tradition, especially from the Renaissance into the 20th century. A cultural historian, Laqueur likes to come at big and familiar topics from unexpected angles ... The canine gaze might seem a marginal topic, but it provides a way to appreciate dogs’ centrality in human experience.
Mr. Laqueur has produced landmark cultural histories on subjects that include the 19th-century Sunday-school movement, conceptions of body and gender from the Greeks to Freud, and the relationship between mortal remains and the living. The Dog’s Gaze seems to have been waiting patiently for his attention ... The balance of the book focuses on the compositional, symbolic and spiritual roles dogs play in art, specifically when it comes to the human condition, modern life and morality. (There are no pictures of bad dogs, only human abuses of their loyalty.) In this book of striking insights, the most transporting come during the detailed analyses of great paintings.
