RSS / Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 17, 2026

The Dog Veronese Was Ordered to Paint Out, and Refused

Thomas Laqueur reads six Veronese canvases for the animals in them and finds the dogs doing structural work, holding the eye still in banquet scenes so crowded they would otherwise scatter it. Then he turns to the 1573 Inquisition transcript. The tribunal objected to the dog at the centre of a Last Supper and told the painter to replace it with Mary Magdalene. Veronese argued for his licence to fill a picture as he saw fit, and settled it by changing the title rather than the paint.

Read the story By Thomas W. Laqueur · The Public Domain Review
Venice, 1573
Venice, 1573
All issues

Design

Arts & Culture

Sound

Collecting

Document

Film

What Architects Actually Change to Make a House Feel Calm
A Lagos Studio Builds Brand Identities Out of Market Signs and Street Speech
The Couple Who Bought Fortis on Instinct and Still Refuse Market Research
Keeping a Thirty Six Square Metre Paris Flat Cool Without Air Conditioning
A Week of New York Street Style, Shot Outside the Shows
Two Photographers on Working Without a Camera, in Chemistry and Sunlight
Photographing Through Hair, Fabric and Water, All of It Done in Camera
Caleb Stein's Hudson Swimmers, Read Against the Tradition of River Books
How a Signature Guitar Actually Gets Built, According to the People Who Build Them
Richard Thompson Solo in Bradford on Avon, and Why the Duets Weakened It
Two Builders Made a New Controller Outside the Big Gear Companies
A Violin Concerto Written After an Encounter With Ukrainian Refugees
A 1986 Type-In Game Almost Nobody Could Type, Saved From a Working Copy
Vintage Signs Across Tennessee, and a Roadside Statue Broken in the Move
What Majorette Got Right on Its 1966 Renault 8 Gordini
One Room of Buck Rogers Toys, and the Rare Set That Completed It
Hundreds of Unprinted Letters About the Irish Horse Trade, Found in a Newspaper's Archive
The Arsenic Compound Numbered 606 and the Long Life of the Magic Bullet
He Stood on Roy Cohn's Roof in 1983 and Was Told to Get Out of the Sun
A 1987 Teleconference Tape Changed How a Historian Explains the Eating Disorder Revolution
Jan Holoubek on Making a Wartime Thriller Look Like a Western
Jonathan Rosenbaum on the Films That Refuse to Explain Themselves
A Filmmaker Watches August in the Water While Coming Down
The Helmet Rig That Put Real Reflections in Spider-Man's Eyes

Follow Signal

A new issue every day. The feed carries each issue in full, so nothing is held back for the site.

Subscribe by RSS