Santo Domingo De Guzmán

A habit, a lily, and a dog

Dominic is identified first by the habit of the order he founded — white with a black cloak — and then by a set of objects that accumulate around it: a lily, a rosary, a star, a book, and a dog carrying a torch, which comes from a legend involving a pun on the order's Latin name. The dog is the sign that does the most work in a crowded picture, because no other saint has one. 4 titles in this collection name Dominic, and this entry gives his name in Spanish while another gives it in English — the record has not standardised between them.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1614 and gives the Museo del Prado in Madrid as its location. No dimensions are recorded. It is filed under male portraiture, with Baroque as the style and Spanish as the nationality; the measured colour family is ochre. There is no religious category on this entry at all — the fields describe a portrait, and the title is the only place the subject is named.

Founders and their orders

Saints who founded orders form their own class in the naming system. Their attributes are institutional rather than lethal: what they wear, what they wrote, what they governed. A picture of such a saint is legible to anyone who can recognise a habit, which in the centuries these pictures were made for was almost everyone.