red dog

By Franz Marc (1880–1916) (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart) [PD], via Wikimedia Commons

By the time he painted this "Roter Hund" (Red Dog" in 1911, Franz Marc had moved his studies from theology to painting.  In a way, he hadn't moved all that far, as he approached art with a search for spiritual purity that placed animals at the center of his symbolism.  Color was paramount, too: for example, red came to equal the materially bound, even violent aspects of life.  I'm not sure he had that philosophy solidified in this early work, in which a monumentally scaled dog rests in a rugged landscape.  Marc's animal symbol of choice, eventually, was the horse, and it's with horses that his work reached its full flower.