Titian and the Dog's Gaze (online)

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 the particular to the general, this talk offers a new way of seeing both a single work of art and a long visual tradition, revealing how, through the eyes of dogs, we come to understand something essential about human experience. This event is also available in person .