Twenty-five thousand years ago, a boy and a dog walked into the Chauvet cave in what is now southwestern France. The boy carried a torch, and by this light he studied the horses drawn on the walls many years earlier by Palaeolithic fingers. The dog stayed close. In fact, as Thomas W Laqueur recounts, its pawprints appear on the limestone floor ‘only where there is art to be seen’. We are at this point in the ‘deep time’ of the dog, in which context perhaps even the designation ‘dog’ is a stretch. But whether wolf, proto-dog or dog-dog, this ancient canid was already in the position occupied by thousands of its descendants: cleaving to its human, and in the process wandering into the history of art.

‘No animal lives more easily in the visual field of humans than the dog,’ Laqueur insists; equally, dogs ‘see us in a way we think we understand’. His book promises ‘a visual history’ of the canine gaze, and certainly delivers on range, running from cave paintings to Giotto to Rin-Tin-Tin. As the first animals to be domesticated – domestication’s ‘proof of concept’ for Palaeolithic humans – dogs have been seen, apparently from the beginning, as a kind of bridge between man and the natural world. In ancient mythology, they run in the hunt with Diana, goddess of in-betweenness, of transitions. In the late 19th century, Edith Wharton saw an ‘usness’ in the eyes of a dog, ‘with the underlying not-usness which … is so tragic a reminder of … when we human beings branched off and left them’. Their proximity to humans is unique: canines’ closest rivals, cats, are ‘only precariously, and only of [their] own volition, in culture’, engaging with their owners on their own terms. Dogs are always there.

All this offers an intriguing lens on the history of Western art, once the ‘thereness’ becomes apparent. As this book’s lavish illustrations make clear, in art as in life, dogs surround us, but their presence often goes unremarked. There are five in Paolo Veronese’s ‘Cecil B DeMille epic of a