A Dead Dog, a Lead Casket, and Five Centuries of Small Dogs in Art

On August 29, 1511, Isabella d'Este's favorite dog Aura fell from a balcony at the top of a tall staircase in Mantua and died instantly. The Marchioness of Mantua, one of the most famous women of Renaissance Italy, responded with a full funeral: a lead casket, a tomb whose first stone she planned to lay herself at the astrologically correct moment, and an open call for epitaphs. Scholars and amateur poets across Italy sent verses over the following months, and even the keeper of the Vatican library contributed lines, relayed through Isabella's eleven-year-old son Federico II of Gonzaga, then a political hostage of Pope Julius II in Rome.

The story opens a new history of small dogs in European art. Stephanie Howard-Smith, author of Yap! A Short History of Small Dogs (Ballantine Books, 2026), traces how lapdogs moved from courtly companions to full portrait subjects over five centuries.

What does Aura's death change for art history?

It shows how early small dogs entered the frame. Gian Giacomo Calandra, Isabella's secretary, called Aura "the prettiest and most agreeable little dog that there ever was." Isabella, inconsolable and crying at dinner, may also have had Aura immortalized on canvas. Two portraits of a woman thought to be Isabella—one by Lorenzo Costa, another attributed to Il Cavazzola or Giulio Campi—show her with a hairy little white dog, perhaps Aura or a relative. One hangs in the king's dressing room at Windsor Castle; the other sits in a bedroom at Hearst Castle in California, the inspiration for Xanadu in Citizen Kane (1941).

Howard-Smith notes that Costa, Campi, and Cavazzola were accomplished painters, but their dogs have an unnervingly human face and a strangely feline nose.

How did lapdogs become symbols?

During the Renaissance (c. 1400–1600), small dogs appeared across portraits, genre scenes, and tomb sculpture. Titian painted small dogs repeatedly; in his portrait of Federico II, now in Madrid's Prado Museum, a sandy-colored dog—possibly Viola, buried in a tomb designed by Giulio Romano—paws at the duke's waist, gazing up at him. 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.

Dogs carried meaning. They symbolized fidelity, as in Jan van Eyck's 1434 Arnolfini Portrait, where a scruffy gray terrier-like dog stands at the feet of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini's wife. They also signaled wealth. In the 1640s, Giovanna Garzoni depicted two tiny lapdogs—likely pug relatives—in belled collars beside Chinese porcelain cups, biscuits, and salami.

Who commissioned group portraits of dogs?

The Medici family, grand dukes of Tuscany, had Tiberio di Tito paint twelve toy dogs and a mastiff in the Boboli Gardens of the Palazzo Pitti in the early seventeenth century. Many dogs wear earrings with hoops, bows, and rosettes; the smallest pokes out of a red box on the keeper's lap.

The record holder is Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566–1633), co-sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands. Her painting known as The Woman with Dogs shows thirty named dogs—including Piramo el Blanco, Piramillo, Sigritilla, Breda, Gris, and the porky Fidiela—alongside pet birds, monkeys, and a lady-in-waiting.

In France, the animaliers broadened beyond hunting scenes. Nicasius Bernaerts, Alexandre-François Desportes, and Jean-Baptiste Oudry painted royal menageries for Louis XIV and Louis XV, while Desportes recorded Louis XV's toy spaniels and Pomeranian—Merluzine, Muscade, Hermine, Jémite, and Cocoq. Jean-Jacques Bachelier painted Madame de Pompadour's spaniel Mimi and poodle Bébé.

What happened under the UV light?

Bachelier's portrait of a fluffy white dog, long labeled a "dog of the Havana breed," shows the animal mid-mischief: a chewed shoe, an ivory billiard ball, a pleading pose with no trace of remorse. During its 1989 restoration, conservators working under UV light found that a ribbon had been extended to drape discreetly over the dog's exposed genitals. The Bowes Museum catalogue once called the work a "splendid piece of Rococo nonsense."

Britain matched the fashion. The Lobkowicz family commissioned a portrait of pugs Asinus and Kokrle, now in the "dog room" of Prague's Lobkowicz Palace. John Wootton (c. 1686–1764) painted four dancing dogs—Lusette, Madore, Rosette, and Moucheby—in the ruins of a classical temple, and portrayed Casey, the cropped-ear harlequin lapdog of Henrietta Harley, Countess of Oxford, on a crimson cushion.

When did dog art go mass market?

The nineteenth century brought Edwin Landseer (1802–1873), the most successful animal artist of all time. Royal Academy schools head Henry Fuseli called the teenage Landseer the "dog boy." He painted Princess Victoria's spaniel Dash—"Dear Dashy"—numerous times; on her 1838 coronation day, Victoria reportedly discarded crown, scepter, orb, and robes to wash the little dog.

Print and ceramic mass production then carried dog art beyond the wealthy. Victorian mantelpieces filled with ceramic spaniels. Howard-Smith even spotted a print of Landseer's Trial by Jury—featuring the 6th Duke of Devonshire's Blenheim spaniel Bony—on the wall in Otto von Bismarck's deathbed photograph.

Landseer is now a byword for Victorian sentimentalism. But as Howard-Smith argues, his openly emotional canine portraits reflected a recent revolution in middle-class European attitudes toward dogs—one that transformed pets from background symbols into named, loved individuals on canvas.