'''Dürer's Rhinoceros''' is the name commonly given to a
woodcut created by
German painter and
printmaker Albrecht Dürer in 1515.
[1] 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
Philip II in
Spain in around 1579.
[2][3]
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 those 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".
[4]
The rhinoceros
On
20 May 1515, an Indian rhinoceros arrived in Lisbon from the
Far East. In early 1514,
Alfonso de Albuquerque, governor of
Portuguese India, sent ambassadors to
Sultan Muzafar II, ruler of
Cambay (modern
Gujarat), to seek permission to build a fort on the island of
Diu. The mission returned without an agreement, but diplomatic gifts were exchanged, including the rhinoceros.
[5] At that time, the rulers of different countries would occasionally send each other exotic animals to be kept in a
menagerie. The rhinoceros was already well accustomed to being kept in captivity. De Albuquerque decided to forward the gift, known by its
Gujarati name of ''ganda'', and its Indian keeper, named Ocem, to King
Manuel I of Portugal. It sailed on the ''Nossa Senhora da Ajuda'',
[6] which left
Goa in January 1515.
[7] The ship, captained by
Francisco Pereira Coutinho,
[8] and two companion vessels, all loaded with exotic
spices, sailed across the
Indian Ocean, around the
Cape of Good Hope and north through the
Atlantic, stopping briefly in
Mozambique,
Saint Helena and the
Azores.
The first known image of the rhinoceros is a rather primitive woodcut which illustrates a poem by Giovanni Giacomo Penni published in Rome in July 1515. (Biblioteca Colombina, Seville).
After a relatively fast voyage of one hundred and twenty 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.
[9] 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. In the context of the
Renaissance, it was a piece of
Classical Antiquity which had been rediscovered, like a statue or an inscription.
The animal was examined by scholars and the curious, and letters describing the fantastic creature were sent to correspondents throughout Europe. The earliest known image of the animal illustrates a ''poemetto'' by
Florentine Giovanni Giacomo Penni, published in
Rome on
13 July 1515, less than 8 weeks after its arrival in Lisbon.
[10] The only known copy of the original published poem is held by the
Biblioteca Colombina in
Seville.
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.
[11] The rhinoceros advanced slowly and deliberately towards its foe; the elephant, unaccustomed to the noisy crowd that turned out to witness the spectacle, fled the field in panic before a single blow was struck.
[12][13]
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.
[14] 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,
[15] 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. Some reports say that the mounted skin was sent to Rome, arriving in February 1516, to be exhibited ''impagliato'' (Italian for "stuffed with straw"), although such a feat would have challenged 16th-century methods of taxidermy. In any event, the rhinoceros did not cause a popular sensation in Rome like the living beast had in Lisbon, although a rhinoceros was depicted in contemporary paintings in Rome by
Giovanni da Udine and
Raphael.
[16][17]
If a stuffed rhinoceros arrived in Rome, its fate remains 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 1996 novel ''The Pope's Rhinoceros''.
[18]
Dürer's woodcut
Pen and ink drawing of the rhinoceros, by
Albrecht Dürer, 1515, now held by the
British Museum. The manuscript caption gives the date of the arrival of the rhinoceros in Lisbon as "1513" (sic).
[19]
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.
[20] 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,
[21] and then a woodcut was created 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:
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, with a
gorget at the throat, a solid-looking
breastplate, and
rivets along the seams; he also 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.
[23][24] 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.
[25] 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.
[26] 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.
[27]
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.
[28] 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,
[29] whereas Dürer's original single block print was copied many times. Dürer produced a first printing of his woodcut in 1515, distinguished by only five lines of text in the heading,
and many further printings followed after Dürer's death in 1528, including two printings in the 1540s, and a further two in the late 16th century.
[30] Later printings have six lines of descriptive text.
[31] The original wood block continued to be used, even though later printings are marred by
woodworm holes and a crack through the rhino's legs.
[32]
Emblem of
Alessandro de' Medici, from Paolo Giovio's ''Dialogo dell'impresse militari et amorosi'', 1557.
Despite its errors, the image remained very popular,
and was taken to be an accurate representation of a rhinoceros until the late 18th century. Dürer may have deliberately chosen to create a woodcut, rather than a more refined and detailed
copperplate engraving, to ensure it would be suitable for mass-market printing.
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").
[33] A sculpture of a rhinoceros based on 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.
[34] 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.
[35]
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 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.
[37] 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.
[38] 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.
[39] 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". It remains a powerful artistic influence, and was the inspiration for
Salvador Dalí's 1956 sculpture, ''Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas'', which has been displayed at
Puerto Banús in
Marbella since 2004.
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, chapter 2.
3. A street in Madrid was named ''Abada'' (rhinoceros in Portuguese) after this animal, that had a curious life too: [1]. [2] (in Spanish)
4. Quoted in Clarke, p.20.
5. Bedini, p.112.
6. Clarke, p.16.
7. Bedini, p.113.
8. História do famoso rhinocerus de Albrecht Dürer, Projecto Lambe-Lambe .
9. See Clarke, p.19, for a photograph of a gargoyle.
10. Giovanni Giacomo Penni, ''Forma e natura e costumi de lo rinocerote'' (...). See Ugo Serani, ''Etiopicas'' 2 (2006) ISSN 1698-689X [3] for the original text in Italian and a translation into Spanish.
11. ★ class=wikiexternal target=_blank>.html Latin original and English translation of Chapter 29, Book VIII of Pliny's ''Naturalis Historia''.
12. Bedini, p.118.
13. Albrecht Dürer, ''The Rhinoceros'', a drawing and woodcut, from the British Museum.
14. Bedini, p.127.
15. The Frioul archipelago consists of four main islands. Bedini, p.128, nominates either Pomègues or Ratonneau; the other possibilities are the small island of If, now occupied by the Château d'If, or Tiboulain.
16. Bedini, p.132.
17. Gessner's Hyena and the Telephone Game, Manda Clair Jost, 2002 (PDF, 21 pages).
18. Biography of Lawrence Norfolk from the British Arts Council; Lawrence Norfolk, 1996, ''The Pope's Rhinoceros: A Novel'', Harmony, ISBN 051759532X.
19. Clarke, caption to colour plate I, p.181.
20. Bedini, p.120 and fn.10.
21. One later acquired by Sir Hans Sloane and now held by the British Museum.
22. The woodcut was probably, per Quammen, p.204, carved by a specialist craftsman known as a ''Formschneyder'', under Dürer's supervision.
23. Group of History and Theory of Science - Dürer's Rhinoceros, State University of Campinas, Brazil.
24. Dürer's Rhinoceros, Kallisti Digital Publishing, 7 March 2003.
25. Suggested by Glynis Ridley (2004), ''Clara's Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-century Europe'', Atlantic Monthly Press, ISBN 184354010X, a study of Clara the rhinoceros; however, there is no mention of this in Bedini.
26. 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.)
27. Commentary on a plate from Conrad Gessner's ''Mammals'', folio 131 verso, from the Humanities Media Interaction Project, Keio University, Japan.
28. Bedini, p.121.
29. Held by the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.
30. Clarke, p.23.
31. A tone block was created around 1620 to add a ''chiaroscuro'' effect to Dürer's original single block print (seen in the printing by Willem Janssen in Amsterdam).[The Journeyman Artist, Richard Anderton, University of the West of England, at the 3rd Impact International Printmaking Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, 2003.]
32. Quammen, p.206.
33. Bedini, p.192.
34. Bedini, p.193.
35. Clarke, chapter 2 and 3.
36. Photo ''Rhinocéros'', 1730 by Johann Gottlieb Kirchner National Ceramic Museum, Sèvres
37. Clarke, p.64.
38. The Philosophy of the Visual Arts, Alperson, Philip A, , , Oxford University Press US, 1992, ISBN 0195059751
39. Theory of Semiotics, Eco, Umberto, , , Indiana University Press, 1978, ISBN 253202175
References
★
The Pope's Elephant, , Silvano A., Bedini, Carcanet Press, 1997, ISBN 1857542770 (particularly Chapter 5, "The Ill-Fated Rhinoceros")
★
The Rhinoceros from Dürer to Stubbs: 1515–1799, , T. H., Clarke, Sotheby's Publications, 1986, ISBN 0856673226 (particularly Chapter 1, "The first Lisbon or 'Dürer Rhinoceros' of 1515")
★
David Quammen (2000), ''The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder'', Scribner, ISBN 0684837285 (particularly p.201–209, ''The Boilerplate Rhino'', previously published in this "Natural Acts" column in
''Outside'' magazine, June 1993)
: ''This article was originally based on a translation of of the
French Wikipedia, dated
2006-07-18''
External links
★
''Albert Dürer'', by
T. Sturge Moore, from
Project Gutenberg
★
''Vector Graphic Adaptions of Dürer's Rhinoceros'' in
Adobe Illustrator Format by
LAFKON (under a
creative commons license)
★
''The rhinoceros'' by
Albrecht Dürer, in the collection of the
National Gallery of Victoria.
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