Titian and the Dog's Gaze
About the event
Join the distinguished historian Thomas W. Laqueur for a talk that begins with a single, extraordinary painting and opens out onto a sweeping rethinking of dogs in art. Focusing on Titian’s 'The Death of Actaeon', Laqueur examines this late masterpiece in vivid detail: the hunted Actaeon, transformed into a stag, is torn apart by his own hounds in a moment of brutal intensity drawn from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. But what happens when we shift our attention to the dogs themselves, those agents of violence, witnesses to transformation, and crucial drivers of the scene? From this close reading, Laqueur expands outward to the broader themes of his acclaimed book ‘The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History’. Across centuries of art, dogs appear not as incidental details but as vital presences, figures that guide the viewer’s eye, anchor narrative meaning and stand in, uncannily, for us. In Titian’s painting, as elsewhere, they are not only part of the story, but part of the act of looking itself. Moving from specific artworks to a broader visual tradition, this talk explores how viewing art through the eyes of dogs, reveals essential truths about the human experience.
