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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.

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

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.

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