Dominican Animals
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The dog is the traditional, and obvious, ‘totemic’ animal for the Dominicans, Domini canes, dogs of the Lord … but they have on occasion been represented otherwise. The painting below, from the 1880s, is called Dominicans in Feathers and is part of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery collection. Some of our readers may know whether the artist, Henry Stacey Marks, had a personal connection with the Order or was simply aware of its black and white habit:
Eric Gill’s dog is well known:
but not perhaps this painting from Santa Maria Novella in Florence which shows Saint Dominic as a ‘master of the hunt’:
