Animal attraction

Sarah Durant on furry friends through history

Various art historians have suggested that the young Leonardo da Vinci, who was a member of Verrocchio's studio, may have painted some part of this work, most likely the fish or the dog

I am pretty certain the little dog had a good life, much of it spent under the voluminous skirts of Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua and renowned Renaissance art collector. The Marchesa Isabella, by anyone lights a formidable character, had a particularly soft spot for little 'Aura', so that when, in the summer of 1511, the animal fell to its death over the edge of steep drop, her grief was such that her courtiers vied with each other to compose the best classical eulogy. (This was the Renaissance after all.)

Female sentimentality? The fripperies of privilege? Possibly, though having spent much of the last two decades writing books set within the Italian Renaissance I know she’s not alone in her passion for these four-legged creatures. Pet dogs find their ways into all manner of Renaissance paintings. Indeed, art experts argue that one of the first times a young apprentice called Leonardo from Vinci put his mark on a commissioned canvas was the image of a fluffy white dog in a painting of 'Tobias and the Angel’.

Then there were images of hunting hounds. And, more importantly, horses. If small dogs suggest gender expectations (witness those inbred little creatures that celebrities now carry in their handbags) then, for Renaissance man, the equivalent was surely the beauty, power and symbol of the horse: vital to any army, the heart of all sophisticated land transport and postal systems and, of course, integral to the ubiquitous pastime of hunting.

Isabella’s husband, Francesco Gonzaga, was a man most at home in the saddle. (Though mounting women came a close second, but in a time when marriage was a union of political interests this was a fairly normal arrangement.) The obsession with horses ran in the Gonzaga family. In Mantua’ s famous Camera degli Sposi, commissioned by his grandfather and painted by Mantegna in the 1460’s, the horse and the hunting dog are given more space than the humans. The Gonzagas traded with the Sultan of Turkey for Barbary horses and Francesco had images of them painted on the exterior of his stables. His son, Federico, went one better, turning the stables into a palace with a great salon filled with life size portraits of his favourite steeds, their names inscribed underneath.

Of course, the world abounded in animal cruelty too. Bear baiting, cock fighting, gladiatorial contests between chimps. But at a time when torture was legal and men were disembowelled alive as punishment, physical pain, animal or human, had a different place in the world. And along with brutality there was also the deep connection of mutual need, and the ability to, if not anthropomorphise, then at least suggest intimacy and sentience. Witness the tradition of doe-eyed sweetness of the ox and the ass in almost every image of the Nativity.

Meanwhile, wild animals were a major source of wonder, proof of God’s astonishing creativity. Trade was the secret here and the exchange of presents across the known world. In 16^th century Florence, the Medici had their own zoo with lions (that once ate a young boy who climbed over the fence) and, most amazingly, a giraffe which was paraded through the streets once a year, particularly for the pleasure of cloistered nuns who crowded at high windows to watch it go by. Cheetahs and leopards prowled their way through Renaissance hunting scenes, while Giulio Romano (he of Federico’s horses) painted the most convincing camel and elephant, proof that he had once been at Papal court, where Leo X was given both animals as gifts. Though the most unlikely creature is surely Dürer’s Rhinoceros, an animal which he never saw, inventing instead serious armour plating and an extra horn.

When it comes to a philosophical take on the relationship between men and animals, the Renaissance marks the beginning of greater understanding, both scientific and artistic, through dissection. There is even the start of questioning human behaviour. That splendid iconoclast Montaigne clearly felt the cruelty of the hunt, though he loved it too much to give it up. A further gallop through history will see Descartes take the pressure off man by defining animals as 'not rational' therefore allying them more closely to the machine; a definition which would finally be toppled by Bentham in one of those watershed moments where an argument is turned on its head with just a few words: 'The question is not can they reason, but can they suffer?'

The last half century has seen two great thinkers on the role of animals: John Berger and Peter Singer. Berger for his revisiting of the profound bond between human and animals through history and culture, and Singer for his uncompromising moral stance that much of human pleasure and convenience is built on the suffering of sentient beings. It is 50 years since the publication of his 'Animal Liberation,' which became the bible for a radical, sometimes, violent political activism in the 1990’s. Singer himself remains pacifistically committed: his recent book, published mischievously in time for American Thanksgiving was a call to stop eating turkey. It didn’t take the market by storm.

Still, some of that passionate activism which characterised the animal liberation movement has been absorbed into the fight against climate change. And here there is an unexpected connection between our exploitation of animals and climate disaster. It is estimated that the one and half billion cows in the world account for 18 % of green house gases through production of methane. Save the planet and free the cow? Given the mix of big business, religion and our appetite for steak and dairy, the odds are not promising. But if — or when — science produces an acceptable version of synthetic meat or dairy, such a move is surely not impossible. And then? Does that mean we phase out the cow? We have been somewhere similar before, when the technology of steam and the motor engine made the working horse redundant to human needs. Its demise was gradual at first, though the attrition of the First World War painfully accelerated the process, killing millions of them. The horse as a species survived, because — well, that same beauty, magnificence, power and symbol which had made it prized throughout history, remains. Though these days, in the west at least, horse owning is largely a pastime of the rich.

It is hard to see the cow occupying such a hallowed space. (I happen to live close to a number of them, and while their very solidity can be comforting, I don’t feel a lot of majesty.) Here perhaps lies the final irony of man’s relationship to domesticated animals. That both their 'being' and their 'not being' depends on us. It’s an existential hand banger, but in the end it seems humans - and the pun here is deliberate — will always be top dog.

Sarah Dunant’s novel on Isabella d’Este The Marchesa is published by White Fox on June 5 and will be serialised on BBC Radio 4

Sarah also joined Erica Wagner on the Boundless podcast — tune in on Spotify / Apple Podcasts