Paolo Veronese, The Adoration of the Magi, 1571 (source)
Attending to attentive canine figures in half a dozen paintings by Paolo Veronese, Thomas W. Laqueur explores the work of an artist whose love of dogs landed him in hot water with the Inquisition (and here)…
The art historian Kenneth Clark thought that Veronese was “the greatest dog lover of the Renaissance”. We have absolutely no biographical evidence to support this claim but we do have the evidence of numbers: there are a great many dogs in Veronese’s paintings. And Clark could have gotten support of a different kind from the great nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin. For Ruskin, Veronese’s dogs had a distinctive moral and social quality, which was especially prominent in one particular painting: Cupid with Two Dogs, a “great heroic poem”. Here, he wrote, two dogs are represented with the “highest, or spiritual view” of their nature: two magnificent mastiffs, “wildest of beasts perhaps they would have been by nature”. Between them is a beautiful boy, “golden quivered” — who represents, Ruskin thought, human love — holding the great beasts by a chain in his hands.
Paolo Veronese, Cupid with Two Dogs, 1580, a “great heroic poem” (source)
Love conquers savagery is how Ruskin interpreted the painting. But perhaps Cupid serves less as a stand-in for love (and its unpredictable nature) and more as a caretaker for these spectacular dogs, known for their steadfastness, who speak to a different kind of amorous union: one as faithful as dogs are to humans. The animals’ allegorical meaning, whatever it is, seems to me less important than the sweet intimacy with which the dogs are painted, grounded in their gaze and their sheer benign weightiness. The one on the right looks quizzically and seductively out at us; the other, the more relaxed one on the left, looks with Cupid toward the painter outside the frame. Perhaps contemporary viewers would have seen them as having been once the “wildest of beasts” but they seem very far from that now.
Visually they are the stars of the show in their almost psychedelically painted black-on-white spotted fur, their red tongues and glistening eyes like points of light. The curves of their backs frame the bathed, soft flesh of the Cupid figure; the leg of the dog on the left is intertwined with his leg — he is astride of it — and touches the left paw of the other dog. All this in a severely constrained space, a vignette, that stands at one end of a scale, with Veronese’s great theatrical scenes (and their dogs) at the other. This is a formally virtuosic painting, whatever else it is about or means, about dogs, doggishness, and the gaze. It would be a surprise, given his careful attention, if Veronese did not in fact love dogs…
[Laqueur considers other s of Veronese’s dogs…]
… We in fact have almost no documentary evidence why any painter, and Veronese in particular, was interested in thinking with dogs. But we do in his case have a tantalizing small hint because on July 18, 1573, he was called before the Inquisition to answer questions about one of his paintings, specifically about a dog that figures prominently, front and centre.
The Inquisitor asked if he had any idea why he had been summoned. Veronese replied that he did not although he speculated it might have been because the Inquisitors had summoned the Prior of San Giovani e Paulo who had commissioned a “Last Supper” from him as a replacement for a Titian on the same subject and “ordered him to have painted [in the picture] a Magdalen in place of a dog”. It had been more than three months since the painting had been finished; the dog was still there; no penitent prostitute had been added. Veronese confessed, that he had not done what they had ordered the Prior to order him to do. He told the Inquisitor that he would gladly do “everything necessary for my honour and for that of my painting”, but that he did “not understand how a figure of Magdalen would be suitable there.”
He had every reason not to understand. It is generally accepted that the painting in question was intended to be, as requested by the monastery, a Last Supper; we can identify it from all the detailed questions the Inquisitors asked and from its subsequent history. He might himself have caused some confusion by saying the painting was of the “Last Supper that Jesus Christ took with His Apostles in the House of Simon” when the Inquisitor asked what picture he was speaking about, although the Last Supper was neither at the house of Simon the Pharisee where the Magdalen story took place (Luke 7:36–50) nor of Simon the Leper (Mark 14:3–9) and Matthew 26:6–13) where Mary anointed Jesus. Veronese made no pretence in any of his feast scenes or other religious painting of faithfully illustrating a text. He was not unusual in this regard.
This was also not a Galileo moment: dogs in religious paintings did not threaten the teachings of the Church; there are plenty of them in paintings of The Last Supper. And they would be particularly appropriate in a commission from a Dominican monastery because of their well-known association with the order’s founder, St Dominic de Guzman. A black dog had announced to the saint’s mother “that she would bear in her womb a dog who, with a burning torch in his mouth and leaping from her womb, seemed to set the whole earth on fire”.6 She named her son after St Dominic of Silo, who had interceded on her behalf when she had failed to conceive. A dog with a torch in its mouth had already become in the late Middle Ages an iconographical sign for her son, the saint, in painting and sculpture for the order named after him and a logo until this day also for parishes named after the order’s founder. Everyone would know this. And, either in response to this story or independently much was made already in the Middle Ages of how the name of the order in Latin — Dominicanus — could easily be repurposed as Domini canis (“Dogs of the Lord”): dogs as the doppelgängers of the monks themselves, scurrying around corralling souls as in Andrea di Bonaiuto’s 1365 fresco Allegory of the Active and Triumphant Church.
But the problem was not, as Veronese first guessed, the presence of a dog instead of a Magdalen. In fact, he was not summoned in front of the Venetian Inquisition for heresy or even dubious iconography, although that charge was the ostensible subject of his trial. Veronese was collateral damage of local ecclesiastical politics, caught up in a struggle between Rome and Venice. The Inquisitor needed to prove himself to a new papal nuncio. In the context of the Counter-Reformation this painting could be construed as suspicious because of its indisputable theatrical extravagance; the Council of Trent had charged bishops with making sure that religious paintings were appropriately decorous and true to text.
Veronese’s only defence against this sort of attack — in addition to trying to claim he was no worse than Michelangelo in allowing his imagination full play — was a version of art for art’s sake: “We painters take the same licence the poets and the jesters take”. He filled the vast space of the canvas appropriately as his imagination dictated: his job was “to create the painting as I thought fit, it was large and could accommodate numerous figures”: “figures as ornaments, of my own invention”. The Inquisitor would have none of this. Everything in appropriate religious art, he was told, everything “befits the spiritual — there are no jesters, no dogs, no weapons, or any such silliness [as in yours]”. Veronese was ordered to “correct the painting” within three months.
In fact, all he did was put in a label where before there had been none. It read in the Latin of the Vulgate “Et fecit ei convivium magnum Levi in domo sua” (“Levi made the Lord a Great Feast”, Luke 5:29). A new name transformed Veronese’s Last Supper, in which soldiers and dogs and jesters might be regarded as sacrilegious and disrespectful, into a painting of a relatively obscure dinner with tax collectors and a great company of publicans at a rich man’s house to which Jesus had been invited. The Feast in the House of Levi, as the painting was now called, remained in the refectory of the priory for which it had been painted, watching over the monks as they ate, until it was moved to the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice in the nineteenth century.
Veronese, The Feast in the House of Levi (detail), 1573 (source)
* Martin Luther (speaking of his dog Tölpel [German for “klutz”]) in “Table Talk No. 2803” (1531), in Tischreden, vol. 3 (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1914) (author’s translation)
[Last] week at the Paris AI summit, Vice President JD Vance stood before heads of state and tech titans and said, “When conferences like this convene to discuss a cutting edge technology, oftentimes, I think, our response is to be too self-conscious, too risk-averse. But never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly calls us to do precisely the opposite.”
Precisely the opposite of “too risk-averse” would seem to be “not risk-averse enough.” Or maybe, as both ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude said when asked for the opposite of “too risk-averse”: “too risk-seeking” or “reckless.” In any event, most people in the AI safety community would agree that such terms capture the Trump administration’s approach to AI regulation. And that includes people who generally share Trump’s and Vance’s laissez faire intuitions. AI researcher Rob Miles posted a video of Vance’s speech on X and commented, “It’s so depressing that the one time when the government takes the right approach to an emerging technology, it’s for basically the only technology where that’s actually a terrible idea.”
The news for AI safety advocates gets worse: The summit’s overall vibe wasn’t all that different from Vance’s. The host, French President Emmanuel Macron, after announcing a big AI infrastructure investment, said that France is “back in the AI race” and that “Europe and France must accelerate their investments.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen vowed to “accelerate innovation” and “cut red tape” that now hobbles innovators. China and the US may be the world’s AI leaders, she granted, but “the AI race is far from being over.” All of this sat well with the corporate sector. As Axios reported, “A range of tech leaders, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, used their speeches to push the acceleration mantra.”
Seems like only yesterday Sundar Pichai was emphasizing the need for international regulation, saying that AI, for all its benefits, holds great dangers. But, actually, that was back in 2023, when people like Open AI’s Sam Altman were also saying such things. That was the year world leaders convened in Britain’s Bletchley Park to discuss ways to collectively address AI risks, including catastrophic ones. The idea was to hold annual global summits on the international governance of AI. In theory, the Paris summit was the third of these (after the 2024 summit in Seoul). But you should always read the fine print: Whereas the official name of the first summit was “AI Safety Summit,” this year’s version was “AI Action Summit.” The headline over the Axios story was: “Don’t miss out” replaces “doom is nigh” at Paris’ AI summit.
The statement that came out of the summit did call for AI “safety” (along with “sustainable development, innovation,” and many other virtuous things). But there was no elaboration. Nothing, for example, about preventing people from using AIs to help make bioweapons—the kind of problem you’d think would call for international regulation, since pandemics don’t recognize national borders (and the kind of problem that some knowledgeable observers worry has been posed by OpenAI’s recently released Deep Research model).
MIT physicist Max Tegmark tweeted on Monday that a leaked draft of the summit statement seemed “optimized to antagonize both the US government (with focus on diversity, gender and disinformation) and the UK government (completely ignoring the scientific and political consensus around risks from smarter-than-human AI systems that was agreed at the Bletchley Park Summit).” And indeed, Britain and the US refused to sign the statement. The other 60 attending nations, including China, signed it.
Journalist Shakeel Hashim wrote about the world’s journey from Bletchley Park to Paris: “What was supposed to be a crucial forum for international cooperation has ended as a cautionary tale about how easily serious governance efforts can be derailed by national self-interest.” But, he said, the Paris Summit may have value “as a wake-up call. It has shown, definitively, that the current approach to AI governance is broken. The question now is whether we have time to fix it.”…
As we prioritize prudence, we might spare a thought for Giordano Bruno; he died on this date in 1600. A philosopher, poet, alchemist, astrologer, cosmological theorist, and esotericist (occultist), his theories anticipated modern science. The most notable of these were his theories of the infinite universe and the multiplicity of worlds, in which he rejected the traditional geocentric (or Earth-centred) astronomy and intuitively went beyond the Copernican heliocentric (sun-centred) theory, which still maintained a finite universe with a sphere of fixed stars. Although one of the most important philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, Bruno’s various passionate utterings led to intense opposition. In 1592, after a trial by the Roman Inquisition, he was kept imprisoned for eight years and interrogated periodically. When, in the end, he refused to recant, he was burned at the stake in Rome for heresy.
This map shows a slice of our Universe. It was created from astronomical data taken night after night over a period of 15 years using a telescope in New Mexico, USA. We are located at the bottom. At the top is the actual edge of the observable Universe. In between, we see about 200,000 galaxies.
Each tiny dot is a galaxy. About 200,000 are shown with their actual position and color. Each galaxy contains billions of stars and planets. We are located at the bottom. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is just a dot. Looking up, we see that space is filled with galaxies forming a global filamentary structure. Far away from us (higher up in the map), the filaments become harder to see…
As we explore, we might recall that it was on this date in 1616 that The Minutes of the Roman Inquisition recorded the conclusion that Galileo’s writings in support of Copernicus’ heliocentric view of the solar system were “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture.” The next day, Galileo was called before Cardinal Bellarmine, who (on Pope Paul V’s instruction) ordered Galileo to abandon the teaching. Shortly thereafter, Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus and other heliocentric works were banned (entered onto the Index Librorum Prohibitorum) “until correction.”
Sixteen years later, Galileo “published” Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo)– that’s to say, he presented the first copy to his patron, Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Dialogue, which compared the heliocentric Copernican and the traditional geo-centric Ptolemaic systems, was an immediate best-seller.
While there was no copyright available to Galileo, his book was printed and distributed under a license from the Inquisition. Still, the following year it was deemed heretical– and he joined Copernicus on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum: the publication of anything else Galileo had written or ever might write was also banned… a ban that remained in effect until 1835.
Is artificial intelligence the new alchemy? That is, are the powerful algorithms that control so much of our lives — from internet searches to social media feeds — the modern equivalent of turning lead into gold? Moreover: Would that be such a bad thing?
According to the prominent AI researcher Ali Rahimi and others, today’s fashionable neural networks and deep learning techniques are based on a collection of tricks, topped with a good dash of optimism, rather than systematic analysis. Modern engineers, the thinking goes, assemble their codes with the same wishful thinking and misunderstanding that the ancient alchemists had when mixing their magic potions.
It’s true that we have little fundamental understanding of the inner workings of self-learning algorithms, or of the limits of their applications. These new forms of AI are very different from traditional computer codes that can be understood line by line. Instead, they operate within a black box, seemingly unknowable to humans and even to the machines themselves.
This discussion within the AI community has consequences for all the sciences. With deep learning impacting so many branches of current research — from drug discovery to the design of smart materials to the analysis of particle collisions — science itself may be at risk of being swallowed by a conceptual black box. It would be hard to have a computer program teach chemistry or physics classes. By deferring so much to machines, are we discarding the scientific method that has proved so successful, and reverting to the dark practices of alchemy?
Not so fast, says Yann LeCun, co-recipient of the 2018 Turing Award for his pioneering work on neural networks. He argues that the current state of AI research is nothing new in the history of science. It is just a necessary adolescent phase that many fields have experienced, characterized by trial and error, confusion, overconfidence and a lack of overall understanding. We have nothing to fear and much to gain from embracing this approach. It’s simply that we’re more familiar with its opposite.
After all, it’s easy to imagine knowledge flowing downstream, from the source of an abstract idea, through the twists and turns of experimentation, to a broad delta of practical applications. This is the famous “usefulness of useless knowledge,” advanced by Abraham Flexner in his seminal 1939 essay (itself a play on the very American concept of “useful knowledge” that emerged during the Enlightenment).
A canonical illustration of this flow is Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It all began with the fundamental idea that the laws of physics should hold for all observers, independent of their movements. He then translated this concept into the mathematical language of curved space-time and applied it to the force of gravity and the evolution of the cosmos. Without Einstein’s theory, the GPS in our smartphones would drift off course by about 7 miles a day.
But maybe this paradigm of the usefulness of useless knowledge is what the Danish physicist Niels Bohr liked to call a “great truth” — a truth whose opposite is also a great truth. Maybe, as AI is demonstrating, knowledge can also flow uphill.
In the broad history of science, as LeCun suggested, we can spot many examples of this effect, which can perhaps be dubbed “the uselessness of useful knowledge.” An overarching and fundamentally important idea can emerge from a long series of step-by-step improvements and playful experimentation — say, from Fröbel to Nobel.
Perhaps the best illustration is the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, a cornerstone of all branches of science. These elegant equations, describing the conservation of energy and increase of entropy, are laws of nature, obeyed by all physical phenomena. But these universal concepts only became apparent after a long, confusing period of experimentation, starting with the construction of the first steam engines in the 18th century and the gradual improvement of their design. Out of the thick mist of practical considerations, mathematical laws slowly emerged…
One could even argue that science itself has followed this uphill path. Until the birth of the methods and practices of modern research in the 17th century, scientific research consisted mostly of nonsystematic experimentation and theorizing. Long considered academic dead ends, these ancient practices have been reappraised in recent years: Alchemy is now considered to have been a useful and perhaps even necessary precursor to modern chemistry — more proto-science than hocus-pocus.
The appreciation of tinkering as a fruitful path toward grand theories and insights is particularly relevant for current research that combines advanced engineering and basic science in novel ways. Driven by breakthrough technologies, nanophysicists are tinkering away, building the modern equivalents of steam engines on the molecular level, manipulating individual atoms, electrons and photons. Genetic editing tools such as CRISPR allow us to cut and paste the code of life itself. With structures of unimaginable complexity, we are pushing nature into new corners of reality. With so many opportunities to explore new configurations of matter and information, we could enter a golden age of modern-day alchemy, in the best sense of the word.
However, we should never forget the hard-won cautionary lessons of history. Alchemy was not only a proto-science, but also a “hyper-science” that overpromised and underdelivered. Astrological predictions were taken so seriously that life had to adapt to theory, instead of the other way around. Unfortunately, modern society is not free from such magical thinking, putting too much confidence in omnipotent algorithms, without critically questioning their logical or ethical basis.
Science has always followed a natural rhythm of alternating phases of expansion and concentration. Times of unstructured exploration were followed by periods of consolidation, grounding new knowledge in fundamental concepts. We can only hope that the current period of creative tinkering in artificial intelligence, quantum devices and genetic editing, with its cornucopia of useful applications, will eventually lead to a deeper understanding of the world…
As we experiment, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 that the Roman Catholic Church admitted that it had erred in condemning Galileo. For over 359 years, the Church had excoriated Galileo’s contentions (e.g., that the Earth revolves around the Sun) as anti-scriptural heresy. In 1633, at age 69, Galileo had been forced by the Roman Inquisition to repent, and spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest. After 13 years of inquiry, Pope John Paul II’s commission of historic, scientific and theological scholars brought the pontiff a “not guilty” finding for Galileo; the Pope himself met with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to help correct the record.
Galileo (standing; white collar, dark smock) showing the Doge of Venice (seated) how to use the telescope. From a fresco by Giuseppe Bertini
“The Taming the Tarasque,” from Hours of Henry VIII, France, Tours, ca. 1500
From dragons and unicorns to mandrakes and griffins, monsters and medieval times are inseparable in the popular imagination. But medieval depictions of monsters—the subject of a fascinating new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan [which includes the image above]—weren’t designed simply to scare their viewers: They had many purposes, and provoked many reactions. They terrified, but they also taught. They enforced prejudices and social hierarchies, but they also inspired unlikely moments of empathy. They were medieval European propaganda, science, art, theology, and ethics all at once…
As we decode dragons, we might recall that it was on this date in 1542, with Pope Paul III’s papal bull Licet ab initio, that the Roman Inquisition formally began. In the tradition of the medieval inquisitions, and “inspired” by the Spanish Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition gave six cardinals six cardinals the power to arrest and imprison anyone suspected of heresy, to confiscate their property, and to put them to death.
While not so much in the prudish spirit of Savonarola’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” the Roman Inquisition– which lasted in the 18th century– was ruthless in rooting out what it considered dangerous deviations from orthodoxy. Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Cesare Cremonini were all persecuted. While only Bruno was executed, the others were effectively (or actually) banished, and in the cases of Copernicus and Galileo, their works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books).
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