On August 29, 1511, Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, patron of the arts, fashion icon, and one of the most famous women in Renais-sance Italy, suffered a great loss.
Isabella was an animal lover, and she loved little dogs in particular. Her courtiers always knew she was about to enter a room when they heard the approaching yaps. Isabella’s very favorite dog was Aura—“the prettiest and most agreeable little dog that there ever was,” according to Isabella’s secretary, Gian Giacomo Calandra. It was Aura who met her unfortunate end on August 29. She had been playing a game of chase with Mamia, another little member of the d’Este pack, when she fell off a balcony at the top of a tall staircase and plunged to the courtyard far below, dying instantly.
Isabella was distraught. The next day Calandra wrote with the sad news to d’Este’s eleven-year-old son, Federico II of Gonzaga, who was being held in Rome as the political hostage of Pope Julius II. Isabella had been inconsolable, crying at dinner as if it were her own mother who had died, and Calandra admitted that “I too have shed some tears.” Isabella immediately set about making funeral preparations: ordering a lead casket, preparing to lay the first stone of the dog’s tomb with her own hands when astrological calculations dictated it was the right moment. She let it be known that she welcomed epitaphs for Aura’s tomb, and over the next few months scholars and amateur poets across Italy sent their offerings. The keeper of the Vatican library even sent to Isabella, via her son, some lines of poetry on the dog’s death.
As well as being commemorated in verse, it is possible that Aura was also immortalized on canvas. As one of the most influential patrons of art during her lifetime, Isabella commissioned paintings that reflected her love of her little dogs. Two portraits of a woman thought to be Isabella—one by the painter Lorenzo Costa, another attributed to Il Cavazzola or Giulio Campi—depict her with a hairy little white dog, who was perhaps Aura, or, if not, one of her relatives. (The first hangs in the king’s dressing room in Windsor Castle; the other is kept in a bedroom at Hearst Castle in California, the inspiration for Xanadu in the 1941 film Citizen Kane.) Costa, Campi, and Cavazzola were all accomplished painters, but it seems their talents didn’t quite stretch to dogs.
Little dogs could also function as a sign of wealth. Some paintings invited a comparison between little dogs and luxury items.
The creature in their portraits has an unnervingly human face and a strangely feline nose. Isabella’s son Federico II seems to have taken more care to have his own pets depicted accurately. He inherited his mother’s love for little dogs and as an adult had them accompany him in his portraits. Perhaps it is Viola—a little dog who died giving birth to a litter of puppies and for whom Gonzaga commissioned a tomb from Giulio Romano, one of the most renowned architects of the day—who appears by his side in the portrait by the Renaissance artist Titian, now in Madrid’s Prado Museum. Titian paints Federico II as a young man with his right hand gently resting on the back of a small sandy-colored dog sitting beside him, the waves of her long fur and its changing shades carefully captured. The dog is turned away from the viewer, and her full focus is on Federico. She gazes up lovingly at her owner, pawing at his waist to get his attention.
Although small dogs had appeared in art in earlier eras, the Renaissance (c. 1400-1600) saw them appearing in all sorts of artworks. Titian rendered several small dogs, not just in portraits of Italian nobles, but in genre paintings of classical and biblical scenes, too. In Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana (1563), the Louvre’s largest painting, a miniature brown-and-white lapdog stands on the biblical banquet table, partaking of the lavish meal set out for the guests.
In such paintings, the small dogs feature almost as a background detail, reflecting the fact that lapdogs were by now a common presence in wealthy households in Italy and across Europe. But they were often included for their symbolic value. For the same reasons little dogs appeared so frequently at the feet of dead women (and clerics) in tomb sculpture, plenty of Renaissance portraits feature them as a symbol of fidelity. Most famous, perhaps, is the scruffy little gray terrier-like dog standing at the feet of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini’s (possibly dead) wife in Jan van Eyck’s 1434 Arnolfini Portrait. But little dogs could also function as a sign of wealth. Some paintings invited a comparison between little dogs and luxury items. In the 1640s, Giovanna Garzoni, one of the foremost female artists of the period, depicted two tiny lapdogs with round skulls, short noses, and slightly buggy eyes—probably relatives of the modern pug—wearing belled collars and sitting next to delicate little Chinese porcelain cups along with biscuits and slices of cured salami.
Gallery-goers are perhaps more accustomed to seeing paintings of private menageries or packs of hunting hounds—both status symbols for the nobility—but there was also a trend for portraits of large groups of little dogs. In early seventeenth-century Italy, the powerful Medici banking family, rulers of Florence as the grand dukes of Tuscany, had the painter Tiberio di Tito paint twelve toy dogs (along with a larger mastiff-type dog) in the Boboli Gardens of the city’s Palazzo Pitti. They are accompanied by their keeper, a man with dwarfism, quite probably an acid joke at his expense. The Medici dogs are a mixed bunch. There are little spaniels, short-haired dogs with snub noses and longish ears (perhaps a precursor to pugs), and a fluffy white dog with a shaved pink bottom (a sort described at the time as a lion dog, a close cousin of the bichon frise and Maltese). A number of them have ornate collars on, and—strangely to our twenty-first-century eyes—just as many are wearing earrings featuring hoops, bows, and rosettes. The smallest of the dogs, a fluffy little white-and-gray thing, is poking out of a red box on the dog keeper’s lap.
But the Medici pack pales in comparison to the one that belonged to Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566-1633), co-sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands, the areas in the Low Countries of northwestern Europe that then belonged to the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty thanks to Mary of Burgundy’s marriage. In a grand painting of her animal retinue now simply known as The Woman with Dogs, thirty of Isabella’s dogs feature alongside her pet birds, pet monkeys, and the titular lady-in-waiting. Some of the dogs are wearing not only earrings, but also bows around their legs vaguely reminiscent of leg warmers; some of them are the short-coated, stubby-snouted white dogs, one of the era’s fashionable lapdog varieties, now extinct. And each dog is named, including Piramo el Blanco (Piramo the White), the tiny, scarf-wearing Piramillo, Sigritilla, Breda, Gris (Gray), and an impressively porky little white dog named Fidiela. It was clearly important to whoever commissioned the painting that the viewer could recognize these animals as individuals, not just as dogs in a general or symbolic sense, even if the huge mass of them makes us pay less attention to each individually.
Over the next few centuries, individual lapdogs make a more determined bid for the viewer’s attention, as painters depicted them with character and a whole array of mischievous tricks.
In France, artists who specialized in depicting animals came to be known as animaliers. Animal art tended to be focused on the masculine world of sport—hunting, horse riding, and, a little later, horse racing. But toward the end of the seventeenth century, sporting artists also began to take on commissions from pet owners, creating art that celebrated dogs who were valued purely for their relationships with their owners. While Nicasius Bernaerts (1620-1678), Alexandre-François Desportes (1661-1743), and Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1688-1755) were commissioned to paint hunting animals or the inmates of the royal menagerie for Louis XIV and Louis XV, they also turned their hands to delicate little dogs. Desportes painted Louis XV’s toy spaniels and Pomeranian (dogs named as Merluzine, Muscade, Hermine, Jémite, and Cocoq). Jean-Jacques Bachelier (1724-1806) specialized more in rococo portraits of pets than he did in grisly depictions of hunting trophies. He was commissioned by the wealthiest and most powerful people in Enlightenment France, including Madame de Pompadour, the official mistress of Louis XV, who owned a little black spaniel named Mimi and a small black-and-white poodle called Bébé (Baby), both painted by Bachelier.
Among Bachelier’s other paintings is an image of a fluffy little white dog sitting up on his hind legs. The woolly fur on his backside is tightly clipped; at his head, the fur is combed into a topknot secured with a little pink bow. (For more than a century, the painting’s subject has been identified as a “dog of the Havana breed,” but he actually resembles a woolly poodle more closely than today’s long-furred silky Havanese dogs.) The dog has been interrupted after a moment of mayhem. He’s been playing with a discarded ivory billiard ball, biting at a ribbon in front of him, and (’twas ever thus) chewing up his owner’s shoes, one of which lies half in and half out of his dog bed. Although he is in a pleading pose, we can’t see a trace of remorse in his eyes. He’s defiant, if anything—he knows that his owner won’t punish him. I say “he” because the dog is definitely male—when conservationists studied the painting under UV light during its restoration in 1989, they found that the ribbon the dog had been playing with had been extended so that it was discreetly draped over the dog’s exposed genitals, lest he offend good taste. The scene makes a striking image. The catalogue of the Bowes Museum once described the painting as a “splendid piece of Rococo nonsense.” And there’s also a repulsive quality to the painting—I think the viewer is aware of a disconnect between the air of dignity Bachelier has given to the proud little dog and the very undignified way he is presented to the viewer.
Even more than the other accoutrements with which sitters were pictured, dogs could convey a range of qualities.
Bachelier’s Havanese portrait may be unrivaled for its aggressive flamboyance, but these sorts of paintings of little pet dogs were by no means an exclusively French phenomenon. In central Europe, one member of the noble Bohemian Lobkowicz family commissioned a painting of two of their favorite pugs, whom the portrait names as Asinus and Kokrle; the painting is now on display in the “dog room” of Prague’s Lobkowicz Palace. In Britain, an artist named John Wootton (c. 1686-1764) specialized in sporting art but had a side hustle painting little dogs in incongruously grand settings. For instance, there’s his portrait of four cheery little brown and white woolly dancing dogs (relatives of today’s bichons and poodles, perhaps) named Lusette, Madore, Rosette, and Moucheby. The four little dogs stand in the ruins of a classical temple, but of course they have no sense of their somber surroundings. Wootton’s dogs are alive; he’s captured them mid-wag, mid-yap, mid-pant. Rosette is doing what dog behaviorists call a play bow. Madore is standing on her hind legs, her beady black eyes peeking out from underneath her woolly fur, looking at the viewer expectantly.
But my favorite of Wootton’s works is a portrait of Casey, a black-and-white harlequin lapdog who belonged to Henrietta Harley, Countess of Oxford. (Harlequin is a color variety named after the coat, which resembles the outfit of harlequin clowns.) The scene shows Casey lying on a crimson velvet cushion. Her disproportionately tiny head appears even more exaggeratedly small because of her lack of ears, which have been cropped closely to her head. Cropped ears used to be the fashion for most short-haired lapdogs, including pugs, well into the nineteenth century, until it came to be considered cruel. In the background of the painting is a portrait within a portrait of two dogs, a black-and-white toy spaniel named Mina and a smallish tan greyhound named Die, next to a large urn. Is this an ancestral portrait of Casey’s parents? They certainly look like the dog on the cushion in the foreground of the painting. Casey is valuable not for her (mixed) pedigree, we’re meant to understand, but because Harley loved her.
The eighteenth century was a golden age for the portraiture of people and dogs in Britain, as well as elsewhere in Europe. The paintings were status symbols, evidence of wealth and position, and offered sitters the chance to self-fashion the image they wanted to project. Little pet dogs were often featured in portraits of their owners. Even more than the other accoutrements with which sitters were pictured, dogs could convey a range of qualities. The choice of dog variety, let alone how the animal was presented (alert and poised to bark? Calmly lounging? Playful?), and the way they directly interacted with an owner (if at all) could act as readable shorthand for the viewer. The choice to commission an image of a dog alone said just as much—it emphasized the importance of the animal to the people who loved them. And, of course, there was an emotional impetus behind the choice to immortalize a pet in art—portraits preserved a dog’s likeness long after their too-short lives were over.
In the nineteenth century, demand for dog art only increased as dogs became widely celebrated for their moral values—and as dog ownership became associated with moral benefits for people. The most successful animal artist of all time is surely Edwin Landseer (1802-1873), perhaps most recognizable for the four colossal sculptures of lions guarding the base of Nelson’s Column, in London’s Trafalgar Square. Landseer’s unique talent for canine art began when he was very young—the head of the Royal Academy schools, Henry Fuseli, used to affectionately call the teenage Landseer the “dog boy”—and after gaining fame as a rising talent, he swiftly ingratiated himself with Britain’s most influential art patron and dog lover, Princess Victoria, heir to the throne. The young Victoria adored the dog she called “Dear Dashy,” a little black, white, and tan tricolor spaniel whom Landseer painted numerous times. Dash had joined the royal family when Victoria was just thirteen, and straight-away she included him in her sittings for the painter George Hayter. Hayter’s portrait of the young princess shows Dash at her feet, happily chomping on her gloves. In a way, this reminds me of Bachelier’s painting of the little poodle—Dash is totally ignorant of his life of luxury and allowed to take privileges not permitted to most people because he is so secure in his mistress’s love and affection. On her coronation day in 1838, as her coach drove up to the steps of Buckingham Palace upon her return from Westminster Abbey, Victoria heard Dash barking with excitement, and rushed into the hall, discarding her crown, scepter, orb, and robes of state so that she could go and wash the little dog. Landseer’s portraits of Dash on his own and with Victoria’s other pets show the dog as an older, calmer animal, his eyes imbued with a depth of feeling.
These days, Landseer is a byword in the art world for Victorian sentimentalism, thanks to his scenes of mourning hounds and noble stags rather than his commissioned pet portraits. There’s no doubt that Landseer’s paintings of dogs acting out very human emotions and scenarios appear kitschy to twenty-first-century tastes. Today, we are so used to celebrating all the virtues of dogs that it can be hard to imagine a time in which such open expressions of this admiration had only freshly become palatable across society. But at the time, the emotional quality of Landseer’s depiction of animals was relatively novel, and his art reflects what was quite a recent revolution in attitudes toward dogs on the part of many middle-class Europeans.
Landseer was also at the forefront of another revolution in dog art. For centuries, fine art was really affordable only for society’s wealthiest dog owners. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the development of print and ceramic techniques and mass production meant that people from across society now had the ability to purchase and decorate their homes with art. Dogs, it seems, were what the people wanted. Ceramic spaniels were ubiquitous on Victorian mantelpieces. Houses across not just Britain but also America and Europe quickly filled with prints (of varying quality) of Landseer’s animal paintings. As a dog historian, I’m always on the lookout for pictures of dogs—including in the background of other images, often quite unexpectedly. Much to my surprise, I once spotted a print of Landseer’s Trial by Jury—a painting in which a standard poodle sits as a judge in front of a group of other dogs (including the 6th Duke of Devonshire’s little chestnut-and-white Blenheim spaniel, Bony, added into the scene by special request after the duke bought the painting)—on the wall in the former German chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s deathbed photograph.
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Excerpted from Yap! A Short History of Small Dogs by Stephanie Howard-Smith. Copyright © 2026 by Stephanie Howard-Smith. Published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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