ABSTRACT
The dog as a threshold figure separating the living and the dead has a long history. In the classical tradition, the canine figure of Cerberus guarded the entrance between the living world and land of the dead. With the notion of a separation between the animal and the human, the simultaneous ability and inability to know death in Agamben's hybrids, and the Ojibwe dog, the author turns to the dog in Las meninas by Diego de Velazquez and call it the 'cynosure' of the painting. Various critics read the dog in Las meninas as a fidelity emblem. Just as Cervantes recognizes the dogs' symbolic connection to fidelity but designs his dogs with another purpose in mind, so Velazquez was well aware of the artistic practice that connected dogs to fidelity. Dogs at the feet of the humanist scholar symbolized the scholar's faithfulness to his enterprise.
