Dogs in the Renaissance: their roles, breeds, and status

Part 1

Life for dogs across Renaissance courts and streets

In Venice, dogs turned up often in art. Painters showed dogs accompanying elegant men through the city on gondolas, and sitting with upper-class women in portraits. Other paintings used dogs as political symbols, including Paolo Veronese's allegory of faithfulness in the Doge's Palace, where a dog watches over a hall used for meetings with foreign diplomats.

Dogs also carried religious meaning in Venetian art. A sculpture by Gerolamo Campagna in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco shows a dog bringing bread to Saint Roch, who lay sick with plague.

Part 2

Breeds and types kept during the period

From the late 1400s onward, paintings by Vittore Carpaccio show white, fluffy dogs wearing red collars beside elegant men and women in Venice. Hunting dogs held a different kind of value. Conrad Gessner's Historia animalium, published in Zurich beginning in 1551, included woodcut illustrations of hunting dogs alongside its descriptions of other animals. Your own dog probably resembles one of these old functional types more than any single named breed of the time.

Part 3

Dogs in daily routines and households

Dogs appeared in many Renaissance paintings, not just outdoors. Venetian paintings placed dogs beside their owners indoors as well as outdoors. That habit of keeping a dog close at hand in the house is one you probably share with your own dog today.

Part 4

Dogs in Renaissance science and writing

Conrad Gessner, a physician and professor in Zurich, published Historia animalium in five volumes between 1551 and 1587. It is considered the first modern zoological work that tried to describe every known animal, and the first bibliography of natural history writing. The book covered more than 4,500 pages and included a section on dogs in its first volume, on page 302.

Gessner organized his animals alphabetically, a change from earlier medieval encyclopedias, which had worked more like mirrors of the world than reference works. He drew on ancient writers such as Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and Aelian, then added his own observations and those sent to him by correspondents. He also tried to separate fact from myth and popular misconception wherever he could. If you have ever looked up your dog's breed history, you are doing a smaller version of what Gessner set out to do.

Part 5

Dogs as gifts and symbols of status

A Saluki and another hound appear among the gifts exchanged in a 1603 painting marking the friendship between Venice and Persia. Small companion dogs appear in the laps of Venetian noblewomen in paintings, valued as much as a jewel or a fine fur coat. Whatever your own dog is, it probably isn't there to prove your rank, and that is one way life has changed since then.

Part 6

How Renaissance ideas about dogs shaped later centuries

Some images of dogs from the Renaissance kept appearing for generations afterward. Gessner's Historia animalium was later abridged as Thierbuch in 1563, and an English translation, Historie of foure-footed beastes, was published in London in 1607. The small companion dog that appears in Carpaccio's late-1400s paintings kept showing up in Venetian art for roughly the next two hundred years, in works by Pietro Longhi, Francesco Guardi, and Giandomenico Tiepolo. The idea of a dog as a constant companion, not just a working animal, is one you probably recognize in your life with your own dog today.