Sometimes I admit that I have thought about how animals were, I don’t know, in the Renaissance, as if there was a possibility that cats and dogs had a different shape and evolved in the course of a few centuries. Obviously cats and dogs have not changed in the last few centuries and this is also evidenced by the puppies painted throughout the history of art. Many examples are now also included in the new Google tool “Pet Portraits”, through which you can compare your pet with cats, dogs, birds, reptiles or horses painted in oil, watercolor or engraved in Japanese lithographs.
“Pet Portraits” is included within the Arts and Culture app and is downloadable for Android and iOS. The tool identifies the animals in the photos and, through an algorithm, compares them to an archive of paintings in museums around the world depicting similar subjects.

“Your pet could be paired with ancient Egyptian figurines, vibrant Mexican street art, Chinese watercolors, and more,” Google states to describe the project. “Pet Portraits” was created as a simple and fun tool, but it allows you to learn about lesser-known artists in art history. Together with the paintings, in fact, appear all the curiosities about the artist who made it, as well as information on the artistic movement.
Finding the lookalike of your dog or cat is not the only fun feature of Arts and Culture. In the past a real challenge was created (to date 120 million photos have been compared on the app) with the “Art Selfie”, which with the same mechanism found look-alikes of real people.
Now you can go back to looking at your cat (I don’t want to believe you have a reptile on your couch) and imagine it wandering around castles in the Middle Ages.