Albrecht Dürer, The Rhinoceros, 1515, woodcut on laid paper, 23.5 x 29.8 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
Enter Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros, the best-known animal of the Renaissance, an early modern celebrity and cultural icon. Its identity is affirmed again and again: “They call it a rhinoceros. It is represented here in its complete form” reads a part of the lengthy gothic script that flanks the top of the image. As if to leave no doubt, “RHINOCERVS” is inscribed in large capital letters in the right corner, with an unusual dorsal horn pointing to the “R.” The artist’s AD monogram is below the label, the date of 1515 above: artist, subject, and date of portrayal are emphatically confirmed. The medium is woodcut, usually cheaper to produce than an engraving, and easy to distribute widely. This is an image that insists on its own truth and was intended for broad public consumption.
And yet it takes only a cursory glance to see that this rhinoceros is strange indeed, and quite unlike what we might expect to see in a zoo. Stolid and hulking, covered with decorative patterns, the surface of the rhinoceros has been likened to an elaborate and richly ornate suit of armor. This is an unusual embellishment by an artist who is more often acknowledged for his “true-to-life” portrayals. Dürer’s own written insistence on the completeness of his representation is all the more striking given that he did not see the rhinoceros for himself and only knew it from a drawing that had been sent to him. The format and obvious plans for distribution make the rhinoceros woodcut more akin to a broadsheet, a tabloid, or even a viral post, with the goal of presenting a sensational event to the biggest audience possible. Why did Dürer depict the rhinoceros this way? And why was he so keen for a large audience?
Left: Albrecht Dürer, Hare, 1502, watercolor on paper, 25 x 22.5 cm (Albertina Museum, Vienna); right: Albrecht Dürer, Stag Beetle, 1505, watercolor and gouache, 14.1 x 11.4 cm (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)
From bestiary to zoo
This was not the first or last time that Dürer showed interest in the world of animals, both nearby and from far-flung distant locations. His many watercolors of animals such as hares, beetles, and various birds show remarkable attention to detail, while his writings emphasized the importance of first-hand observation. During his travels to the Low Countries in 1520–21 Dürer sketched a baboon, a lynx, and a chamois in a garden in Brussels. From his diaries, we know of his excitement at the news of a beached whale in Zeeland that he was determined to travel to and see for himself. His advice for students of art was clear: “Study nature diligently. Be guided by nature and do not depart from it, thinking that you can do better yourself. You will be misguided for truly art is hidden in nature, and he who can draw it out possesses it.” [1] Like his contemporary Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer valued first-hand experience and eye-witness testimonial. Rather than repeating what was available in medieval pattern books, he sought to show things as he perceived them, and his animal and plant studies mark a turning point for the history of scientific illustration.
In Dürer’s “zoo” the rhinoceros is clearly an anomaly—idiosyncratic and strange when compared to his other more faithful depictions of animals from life. But this was no anonymous creature found in a forest near home. Dürer emphasized the rhinoceros as exotic and curious, clad in armor and prepared for battle for a reason. He ensured an afterlife for this celebrity creature, and his woodcut would become the definitive image of a rhinoceros for centuries to come.
A singular creature
Dürer’s source was a written testimonial and sensational back story that came to him from afar. The rhinoceros had arrived in the port of Lisbon on May 20, 1515, and was celebrated as the first rhinoceros to reach Europe alive since the 3rd century. The ancient Romans had maintained exotic menageries, and now leaders of Renaissance courts sought to do the same. Governor Albuquerque of Portuguese India had received the rhinoceros as a gift from Sultan Muzafar II, ruler of Gujarat; and the governor in turn sent the animal, along with a cargo of spices, to his king in Portugal, Manuel I. Shipped from the region of Cambaia in Northwest India, one of the farthest of the Portuguese colonies, it is remarkable that the rhinoceros survived the journey. In a later act of diplomacy, King Manuel would send the rhinoceros to Pope Leo X in Rome, however, the Portuguese vessel capsized near Porto Venere in January 1516, and the crew and rhinoceros drowned.
Albrecht Dürer, The Rhinoceros, 1515, pen and brown ink, 27.4 x 42 cm (© The Trustees of the British Museum, London)
How did Dürer, in distant Nuremberg, come to know of these events? In a newsletter received by the mercantile community of Nuremberg, Valentim Fernandes—a Moravian printer who lived and worked in Portugal—detailed the arrival and appearance of the exotic creature at the court in Lisbon. While this newsletter has not survived, we know of its contents thanks to a drawing by Dürer (now in the British Museum) that became the prototype for his own woodcut. After announcing the date and place of the arrival of the rhinoceros, Dürer includes a textual description of the creature at the bottom of his drawing and the top of his woodcut:
…it is covered with thick scales and in size like an elephant, but lower and is the elephant’s deadly enemy; it hath on the fore-part of its nose a strong sharp horn and when this beast comes near the elephant to fight with him, he always first whets his horn upon the stones; and he runs at the elephant with his head between his forelegs, then rips up the elephant where he has the thinnest skin, and gores him; the elephant is terribly afraid of the rhinoceros, for he gores him always, wherever he meets an elephant, for he is well armed, and is very alert, nimble. Albrecht Dürer, translated text from The Rhinoceros, 1515
The theme is violent combat, with the elephant as enemy. No wonder, then, that Dürer depicted the rhinoceros as prepared for battle wearing a suit of embellished armor. The “thick scales” become a breastplate, pauldrons for the shoulders, faulds for the hindquarters, and even the simulation of chain mail in the decorative patterning. Dürer was at the height of his labors for Emperor Maximilian I and was well aware of the types of armor worn by knights past and present.
Apart from the newsletter received at a distance, Dürer would have had little information to go on, in part because the rhinoceros was an unknown entity at the time. Ancient authors had little to say, and in the medieval bestiary, the rhinoceros was often interchanged with the unicorn as a single-horned and fierce creature, as already noted a rhinoceros had not been seen in Europe since the 3rd century. By contrast, the elephant was represented in many 16th-century menageries, including Lisbon and Rome—King Emmanuel had sent Pope Leo X an elephant the previous year.
Rhinoceros (detail), Albrecht Dürer, The Rhinoceros, 1515, woodcut on laid paper, 23.5 x 29.8 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
The ancient Roman historian Pliny the Elder had also described the animosity between the rhinoceros and elephant, and a fight was arranged by the court for June 3, 1515 (apparently the elephant “turned tail,” disappointing audiences). Regardless, the presence of a live rhinoceros in Lisbon was a sensational and newsworthy event for which Dürer provided a definitive vision.
Conrad Gessner, Historiae Animalium, volume 1 (1551), p. 953 (National Central Library of Rome)
A global image before globalism
Reporting from afar, Dürer’s depiction was like a major journalistic scoop. The woodcut was in high demand and went through at least eight editions, with two further printings from the original wood block in 1540 and 1550. In the Renaissance, news was not instantaneous, but it could travel fast. For example, when Martin Luther promoted the Reformation using broadsheets and pamphlets, one contemporary noted that it took fourteen days for a pamphlet to be known in the German lands, and four weeks for all of Christendom. [2]
Dürer’s rhinoceros as an armored combatant remained a reference point for centuries to come, and the image was copied and reached an unprecedented level of dissemination. It became the prototype for virtually all succeeding rhinoceros illustrations for the next three centuries. This included appearances in natural histories, for example the Swiss doctor Conrad Gessner featured the rhinoceros in his Historiae Animalium (1551), Jan Joesten’s zoological atlas Curious Descriptions of Nature of Four-Footed Animals, Fish and Bloodless Water Animals, Birds, Crocodiles, Snakes and Dragons (1660) also included Dürer’s rhinoceros. Writing in 1938 the art historian Friedrich Winkler stated that school-books had only then given up using Dürer’s image of the rhinoceros in favor of more “naturalistic” depictions.
Despite the creation of other more visually precise depictions of the rhinoceros, for centuries it was Dürer’s woodcut that intrigued artists, scientists, and the public alike. Celebrated in its lifetime and beyond, the rhinoceros was invincible in art, and its broad dissemination made it the most global of images even before the era of globalism.
