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The Rhinoceros
Artist	Albrecht Dürer
Year	1515
Type	woodcut

Dürer's Rhinoceros is the name commonly given to a woodcut engraved by Albrecht Dürer in 1515. The image was based on a written description and brief sketch by an unknown artist of an Indian rhinoceros that had arrived in Lisbon earlier that year. Dürer never saw the actual rhinoceros, which was the first living example seen in Europe since Roman times. In late 1515, the King of Portugal, Manuel I, sent the animal as a gift for Pope Leo X, but it died in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy in early 1516. A live rhinoceros was not seen again in Europe until a second specimen arrived from India at the court of Phillip II in Spain in 1577.

Despite its anatomical inaccuracies, Dürer's woodcut became very popular in Europe and was copied many times in the following three centuries. It was regarded as a true representation of a rhinoceros into the late 18th century. Eventually, it was supplanted by more realistic drawings and paintings, particularly paintings and engravings of Clara the rhinoceros, who toured Europe in the 1740s and 1750s. It has been said of Dürer's woodcut, "probably no animal picture has exerted such a profound influence on the arts."

The rhinoceros

On 20 May 1515, an Indian rhinoceros arrived in Lisbon from the far east. In early 1514, the beast had been given to Alfonso de Albuquerque, governor of Portuguese India, by Sultan Muzafar II, ruler of Cambay (modern Gujarat), as part of an exchange of diplomatic gifts. At that time, the rulers of different countries would occasionally send each other exotic animals to be kept in a menagerie. De Albuquerque decided to forward the gift, known by its Gujerati name of ganda, and its Indian keeper, named Ocem, to King Manuel I of Portugal, on the Nossa Señhora da Ajuda, which sailed from Goa in January 1515. The ship and two companion vessels, all loaded with exotic spices, sailed across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Atlantic, stopping briefly in Mozambique, Saint Helena and the Azores.

After a voyage of 120 days, the rhinoceros was finally unloaded in Portugal, near the site where the Manueline Belém Tower was under construction. The tower was later decorated with gargoyles shaped as rhinoceros heads under its corbels. A rhinoceros had not been seen in Europe since Roman times: it had become something of a mythical beast, occasionally conflated in bestiaries with the "monoceros" (unicorn), so the arrival of a living example created a sensation. The exotic animal was housed in King Manuel's menagerie at the Ribeira Palace in Lisbon, separate from his elephants and other large beasts at the Estãos Palace. On Trinity Sunday, 3 June, Manuel arranged a fight between the rhinoceros and a young elephant from his collection, to test the account by Pliny the Elder that the elephant and the rhinoceros are bitter enemies. The rhinoceros advanced slowly and deliberately towards its foe; the elephant, unaccustomed to the noisy crowds that turned out to witness the spectacle, fled the field in panic before a single blow was struck.

Manuel decided to give the rhinoceros as a gift to the Medici Pope, Leo X. The King was keen to curry favour with the Pope, to maintain the Papal grants of exclusive possession to the new lands that his naval forces had been exploring in the far east since Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to India around Africa in 1498. The previous year, the Pope had been very pleased with Manuel's gift of a white elephant, also from India, which the Pope had named Hanno. Together with other precious gifts of silver plate and spices, the rhinoceros, with its new collar of green velvet decorated with flowers, embarked in December 1515 for the voyage from the Tagus to Rome. The vessel passed near Marseille in early 1516. King Francis I of France was returning from Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence, and requested a viewing of the beast. The Portuguese vessel stopped briefly at an island off Marseilles, where the rhinoceros disembarked to be observed by the King on 24 January.

After resuming its journey, the ship was wrecked in a sudden storm as it passed through the narrows of Porto Venere, north of La Spezia on the coast of Liguria. The rhinoceros, chained and shackled to the deck to keep it under control, was unable to swim to safety and drowned. The carcass of the rhinoceros was recovered near Villefranche and its hide was returned to Lisbon, where it was stuffed with straw. The mounted skin was sent to Rome, arriving in February 1516, to be exhibited impagliato (Italian for "stuffed with straw"). The rhinoceros was depicted in contemporary paintings in Rome by Giovanni da Udine and Raphael, but the stuffed animal did not create such a sensation in Rome as the living beast had in Lisbon.

The fate of the stuffed rhinoceros is unknown: it may have been removed to Florence by the Medici, or it may have been destroyed in the sack of Rome in 1527. Its story was the basis for Lawrence Norfolk's novel The Pope's Rhinoceros, published in 1996.

Dürer's woodcut

A Moravian merchant, Valentim Fernandes, saw the rhinoceros in Lisbon shortly after it arrived and wrote a letter describing it to a friend in Nuremberg in June 1515. The original letter in German has not survived, but a copy in Italian is held in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. A second letter of unknown authorship was sent from Lisbon to Nuremberg at around the same time, enclosing a sketch by an unknown artist. Dürer saw the second letter and sketch in Nuremberg. Without ever seeing the rhinoceros himself, Dürer made two pen and ink drawings, then created a woodcut from the second drawing, the process of fabrication making one a reflection of the other.

The German inscription on the woodcut, drawing largely from Pliny's account, reads:

On the first of May in the year 1513 AD, Manuel, the great and powerful king of Portugal, brought this living animal from India, called the rhinoceros. This is an accurate representation. It is the colour of a toad, and is almost entirely covered with thick scales. It is the size of an elephant but has shorter legs and is almost invulnerable. It has a strong pointed horn on its nose, which it sharpens on stones. It is the mortal enemy of the elephant. When they meet, the rhinoceros lowers its head between its front legs and runs forward, fatally stabbing its enemy, which is unable to defend itself. The elephant is afraid of the rhinoceros, for it can do nothing in the face of such a well-armed animal. It is said that the rhinoceros is fast, jolly and cunning.

Dürer's woodcut is not an entirely accurate representation of a rhinoceros. He depicts an animal with hard plates that cover its body like sheets of armour, places a small twisted horn on its back, and gives it scaly legs and saw-like rear quarters. None of these features is present in a real rhinoceros. It is possible that a suit of armour was created for the rhinoceros's fight against the elephant in Portugal, and that these features depicted by Dürer are parts of the armour. Alternatively, Dürer's "armour" may represent the heavy folds of thick skin of an Indian rhinoceros, or, as with the other inaccuracies, may simply be misunderstandings or creative additions by Dürer. Dürer also draws a scaly texture over the body of the animal, including the "armour". This may be Dürer's attempt to reflect the rough and almost hairless hide of the Indian rhinoceros, which has wart-like bumps covering its upper legs and shoulders. On the other hand, his depiction of the texture may represent dermatitis induced by the rhinoceros' close confinement during the four-month journey by ship from India to Portugal.

A second woodcut was created by Hans Burgkmair in Augsburg around the same time as Dürer's in Nuremberg. Burgkmair corresponded with merchants in Lisbon and Nuremberg, but it is not clear whether he had access to a letter or sketch as Dürer did, perhaps even Dürer's sources, or saw the animal himself in Portugal. His image is truer to life, omitting Dürer's more fanciful additions and including the shackles and chain used to restrain the rhinoceros; however, Dürer's woodcut is more powerful and eclipsed Burgkmair's in popularity. Only one copy of Burgkmair's image has survived, whereas Dürer's original single block print was copied many times. Dürer produced a first printing of his woodcut in 1515. After Dürer's death in 1528, two printings followed in the 1540s, and a further two in the late 16th century. A tone block was created in around 1620 to add a chiaroscuro effect to Dürer's original single block print (see in the printing by W. Janssen in Amsterdam).

Notwithstanding its errors, the image remained very popular, and was taken to be an accurate representation of a rhinoceros until the late 18th century. Images derived from it were included in naturalist texts, including Sebastian Münster's Cosmographiae (1544), Conrad Gessner's Historiae Animalium (1551), Edward Topsell's Histoire of Foure-footed Beastes (1607) and many others. A rhinoceros that was clearly based on Dürer's woodcut was chosen by Alessandro de' Medici as his emblem in June 1536, with the motto "Non buelvo sin vencer" (old Spanish for "I shall not return without victory"). A sculpture of a rhinoceros based Dürer's image was placed at the base of a 70-foot (21 m) high obelisk designed by Jean Goujon and erected in front of the Church of the Sepulchre in the rue Saint-Denis in Paris in 1549 to welcome the arrival of the new King of France, Henri II. A similar rhinoceros, in relief, decorates a panel in one of the bronze west doors of Pisa cathedral. The rhinoceros was depicted in numerous other paintings and sculptures, and became a popular decoration for porcelain. The popularity of the inaccurate Dürer image remained undiminished despite an Indian rhinoceros spending eight years in Madrid, from 1579 to 1587 (although a few examples of a print of the Madrid rhinoceros created by Philippe Galle in Antwerp in 1586, and derivative works, have survived), and the exhibition of a live rhinoceros in London a century later, from 1684–86, and of a second individual after 1739.

The pre-eminent position of Dürer's image and its derivatives declined from the mid- to late-18th century, when more live rhinoceroses were transported to Europe, shown to the curious public, and depicted in more accurate representations. Jean-Baptiste Oudry painted a life-size portrait of Clara the rhinoceros in 1749, and George Stubbs painted a large portrait of a rhinoceros in London in around 1790. Both of these paintings were more accurate than Dürer's woodcut, and a more realistic conception of the rhinoceros gradually started to displace Dürer's image in the public imagination. In particular, Oudry's painting was the inspiration for a plate in Buffon's encyclopedic Histoire naturelle, which was widely copied. In 1790, James Bruce's travelogue Travels to discover the source of the Nile dismissed Dürer's work as "wonderfully ill-executed in all its parts" and "the origin of all the monstrous forms under which that animal has been painted, ever since". Even so, Bruce's own illustration of the African white rhinoceros, which is noticeably different in appearance to the Indian rhinoceros, still shares conspicuous inaccuracies with Dürer's work. Semiotician Umberto Eco argues that Dürer's "scales and imbricated plates" became a necessary element of depicting the animal, even to those who might know better, because "they knew that only these conventionalized graphic signs could denote «rhinoceros» to the person interpreting the iconic sign." He also notes that the skin of a rhinoceros is rougher than it visually appears and that such plates and scales portray this non-visual information to a degree. Until the late 1930s, Dürer's image appeared in school textbooks in Germany as a faithful image of the rhinoceros;in German, the Indian rhinoceros is still called the Panzernashorn, or "armoured rhinoceros".

Notes

1. Some sources erroneously say 1513, copying a typographical error made by Dürer in one of his original drawings and perpetuated in his woodcut. (Bedini, p.121.)
2. ^ Clarke, p.20.
3. Bedini, p.112.
4. Clarke, p.16.
5. Bedini, p.113.
6. See Clarke, p.19, for a photograph of a gargoyle.
7. ^ Latin original and English translation of Chapter 29, Book VIII of Pliny's Naturalis Historia.
8. Bedini, p.118.
9. Albrecht Dürer, The Rhinoceros, a drawing and woodcut, from the British Museum.
10. Bedini, p.127.
11. The Frioul archipelago consists of four main islands. Bedini, p.128, nominates either Pomègues or Ratonneau; the other possibilties are the small island of If, now occupied by the Château d'If, or Tiboulain.
12. Bedini, p.132.
13. ^ Gessner's Hyena and the Telephone Game, Manda Clair Jost, 2002.
14. Clarke, caption to colour plate I, p.181.
15. Bedini, p.120 and fn.10.
16. One later acquired by Sir Hans Sloane and now held by the British Museum.
17. Bedini, p.121; some versions translate Krot as "tortoise".
18. Rough translation of a French translation given in the doctoral thesis of Bruno Faidutti at l'université Paris XII: La licorne et le rhinocéros, chapter 3.2, illustration 10, November 1996. Template:Fr icon; see also a translation in Clarke, p.20.
19. Group of History and Theory of Science - Dürer's Rhinoceros
20. ^ Dürer's Rhinoceros
21. Suggested by Glynis Ridley, in Clara's Grand Tour, about Clara the rhinoceros; there is no mention of this in Bedini.
22. Dürer was living near the armourer's quarter in Nuremberg, Schmeidegasse, and was designing armour at about the same time; this aspect may therefore be a creative conceit. (Clarke, p.20.)
23. Rhinoceros.
24. ^ Bedini, p.121.
25. Held by the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.
26. ^ Clarke, p.23.
27. The Journeyman Artist, Richard Anderton.
28. Bedini, p.192.
29. Bedini, p.193.
30. Clarke, chapter 2 and 3.
31. Clarke, p.64.
32. Alperson, Philip A (1992). The Philosophy of the Visual Arts. Oxford University Press US. pp. p. 80. ISBN 0195059751. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
33. Eco, Umberto (1978). Theory of Semiotics. Indiana University Press. pp. p. 205. ISBN 253202175. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)

References

• Silvano A. Bedini, The Pope's Elephant, Carcanet Press, 1997, ISBN 1857542770 (particularly Chapter 5, The Ill-Fated Rhinoceros)
• T. H. Clarke, The Rhinoceros from Dürer to Stubbs - 1515-1799, Sotheby's Publications, 1986, ISBN 0856673226 (particularly Chapter 1, "The first Lisbon or 'Dürer Rhinoceros' of 1515")

• This article was originally based on a translation of part of an article of the French Misplaced Pages, dated 2006-07-18

External link

• Albert Durer, by T. Sturge Moore, from Project Gutenberg

• Famous rhinos
• Renaissance art
• 1515 works
• Collection of the British Museum