Medieval pet portrait

This is the style people usually mean when they say medieval and then get shown something renaissance instead. The two are not the same and the difference is easy to see once you know it. Renaissance painting discovered perspective, modelled light and tried to look real. Medieval painting, three hundred years earlier, did none of that on purpose: no depth, no cast shadows, gold instead of sky, and a figure sized by importance rather than by distance.

That flatness is exactly why it suits an animal. There is no attempt at photographic likeness to fall short of, so the portrait reads as a decorated symbol of your pet rather than a slightly-off painting of them. The markings still have to be right, but the style is not pretending to be a photograph and so it never lands in the uncanny middle.

The gold background is the signature and it is doing real historical work: manuscript illuminators used gold leaf because there was no way to paint light itself, so a saint or a noble beast was placed against literal metal. Expect scrollwork, a heraldic banner, a tiled floor in impossible perspective, and often a small scribe or a dragon tucked into the margin, which is what medieval artists actually put there.

It works best on dogs and cats with a calm, upright, front-facing pose, because that is how manuscript figures are composed. An action shot fights the whole grammar of the style. If your animal has a strong silhouette, upright ears or a distinctive ruff, it will come through especially well: flat painting lives on outline.