"Musée des Beaux Arts"

"where the dogs go on with their doggy life" (W.H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts")

I have an old notebook-journal featuring pages with an upper margin; for a year or two, I took note of quotations I liked by scribbling them in that margin. A surprising number of quotations came from poets, although the language is rarely particularly beautiful or spectacular.

In all likelihood, I noted this Auden line not because the poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" spoke to me--although I do quite like some of Auden's other poems--but because this line illustrates a phenomenon in a particular school of painting that I've adored.

Whenever I go to the National Gallery in Ottawa, I insist that my companions examine one or two of the paintings in one particular room, by (or in the style of) Canaletto or Belloto. In the street scenes depicting urban Italian squares, I can always find one or two dogs, usually white or cream-coloured, most of them with the same curved, fringed tails. In "The Piazzetta" on this page, for example, I spotted two of those canine fellows, right off the bat.

The people from different eras sometimes look very alien, while the dogs are always familiar.