Thirty-five thousand years ago, in the Ardèche region of France, Paleolithic artists drew a spectacular bestiary on the walls of the Chauvet cave. Their focus was apex predators, so there were lots of lions, as well as mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. Dogs were nowhere to be seen, and yet in the soft sediment on the limestone floor of the cave, there are traces of canid pawprints next to human footprints. Two fellow creatures, most likely a boy and a dog, stood together, about 10,000 years after the art was made, looking up at the walls in wonder. Here was a moment of shared contemplation, followed perhaps by a glance to see the other’s reaction.

In this luminous book, the American cultural historian Thomas Laqueur explores what he calls “the dog’s gaze”. The dog was the first animal to live companionably with humans, and Laqueur argues that this marks the boundary between nature and culture. It is this threshold status that has, in turn, qualified the dog to play a rich, symbolic part in western art. Just having dogs in a picture – snuffling for picnic crumbs in Seurat’s La Grande Jatte or trooping home in Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow – becomes a way for an artist to pack an image with extra resonance and second-order meaning.

From this starting point Laqueur takes us on a wonderfully illustrated tour of dogs in art, from the shitting cur in Rembrandt’s etching The Good Samaritan to the Jeff Koons balloon dog, by way of cinema superstar Lassie. His special interest, though, is for those places where dogs are engaged in an act of looking. There are two main scenarios. Either the dog is peering deeper into the scene as if to work out what is going on, or else it is turning to look at the viewer, as if to say “are you seeing this?” or even “can you believe it?”

A prime example concerns the sleepy mastiff in the bottom right-hand corner of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, set at the busy Madrid court of Philip IV. In compositional terms the dog’s solid, weighty form provides a grounding for the kerfuffle going on elsewhere: ladies-in-waiting fuss with the Infanta’s dress, the court chamberlain hovers in an open doorway, the king and queen appear in a mirror and Velásquez even paints himself into the picture. The mastiff’s droopy-eyed glance out of the frame and towards the viewer is matter-of-fact and just the right side of cynical. “Don’t worry about all the tricks of perspective that are unfolding above my head”, it seems to be saying, “you and I know which way is up.”

In the cottage industry of scholarly comment that has sprung up around Las Meninas in the last 350 years, the mastiff rarely gets noticed. One person who did see it, though, was Picasso. In 1957 he produced a series of paintings which riff on Velásquez’s masterpiece. In 15 of them the Spanish mastiff has been replaced by Picasso’s beloved dachshund, Lump. Faintly ludicrous, Lump romps through this Cubist universe, always looking out of the frame with what Laqueur calls a “brazen” gaze, as if challenging the viewer to make sense of a scene that does not even pretend to offer any kind of stable meaning.

By the end of this clever, beautiful book, Laqueur has persuasively made his point that the dog’s function in western art is to provide an entry-point or alter ego for viewers who might otherwise feel overwhelmed or outclassed. In Veronese’s spectacular The Wedding Feast at Cana, there are no fewer than six dogs on duty. While the pious ones look on entranced at the miracle unfolding in front of them, there is a little scruff in the corner who is more interested in the scraps that the tipsy guests might allow to fall to the floor. By this generous gesture, Veronese allows the greedy, snuffling viewer to have a place at the sacred scene.

Although the painting was a wild success, Veronese was in for a shock. When, 10 years on, in 1573, he tried to put a dog into his interpretation of the Last Supper, the Inquisition came down on him for blasphemy. Unperturbed, the artist simply changed the title to The Feast in the House of Levi and made sure that the dog stayed in the picture.