Rhino (Durer engraving)

On May 20, 1515, an Indian rhino was brought to Lisbon from the East. In early 1514, Afonso d'Albuquerque , the governor of Portuguese India , sent ambassadors to Sultan Muzafar II, the ruler of Cambay , for permission to build a fort on Diu Island. The ambassadors did not get permission, but exchanged diplomatic gifts, among which they received a rhino .

At that time, it was customary among rulers to give each other exotic animals. At that time they knew how to keep rhinos in captivity. D'Albuquerque decided to send a gift (a rhinoceros named Ganda) with the ranger King of Portugal Manuel I. In January 1515, a rhino was sent from Goa by ship. The ship, led by Francisco Pereira Coutinho, accompanied by two other vessels, fully loaded with rare animals, crossed the Indian Ocean, circled the Cape of Good Hope , crossed the Atlantic Ocean with brief stops in Mozambique , St. Helena and the Azores .

After a relatively short trip (it took 120 days to complete the trip), the rhino was brought ashore in Portugal, not far from the site of the construction of the Belen Tower . The tower was soon decorated with gargoyles in the shape of rhino heads. Since Roman times, rhinos in Europe have not been seen; they began to be considered mythical animals , sometimes they were mixed with unicorns . The arrival of the living rhino caused a sensation. In the context of the Renaissance , a rhino was seen as a piece of antiquity.

The animal aroused the interest of scientists and simply curious. All over Europe letters were sent describing a fantastic animal.

The earliest depiction of a rhino served as an illustration of a Florentine poem by Giovanni Giacomo Penny , published July 13, 1515, less than 8 weeks after the rhino arrived in Lisbon. The only currently known copy of the poem is stored at the Columbus Institute in Seville .

The exotic animal was kept in the zoo of King Manuel in the Ribeira palace in Lisbon, separately from elephants and other large animals. On trinity, June 3, King Manuel staged a fight between a rhinoceros and a young elephant from the zoo to test Pliny the Elder 's claim that the elephant and rhino are the worst enemies. The rhino resolutely and leisurely approached his opponent, but the elephant, frightened by the noise of the crowd, escaped.

Manuel decided to give the rhino to Pope Leo the Tenth . The king was interested in the favor of the pope to maintain exclusive ownership of the lands discovered by his navy in the Far East since Vasco da Gama . The year before, the pope really liked the white elephant, whom he named Hanno . A rhinoceros in a green velvet collar decorated with flowers, along with other valuable gifts, was sent to Rome in December 1515. At the beginning of 1516, the ship passed by Marseille. King of France Francis I was returning from Saint-Maximin-la-Saint-Bom in Provence and expressed a desire to look at the animal. The Portuguese ship stopped briefly on an island near Marseille, where a rhino was shown to the king.

Then the ship continued its journey, but fell into a severe storm when it passed through a narrow passage in Portovenere north of La Spezia on the shore of Liguria and sank. The rhino was chained to the deck, and sank with the ship. The body of a rhinoceros was caught near Villefranche-sur-Mer , the skin was sent to Lisbon, where a stuffed animal was made from it. Some sources claim that the skin was sent to Rome to the exhibition "packed with straw", however, such messages dispute the notion of the existing taxidermy technologies at that time. In any case, the rhinos did not cause a sensation in Rome, similar to that of the living rhinos in Lisbon. Rafael and Giovanni da Udine sketched rhinos.

If the stuffed rhino was brought to Rome, its further history is unknown. He could be transported to Florence, it could be destroyed during the pogroms in 1527 . The fate of the rhino served as the basis for Laurence Norfolk ’s novel "The Pope's Rhinoceros" 1996 ^[3] .

Valentin Fernandez, a merchant and publisher from Moravia, saw rhinos in Lisbon and wrote a letter to his friend in Nuremberg with a description. The original of the letter in German has not been preserved. A copy of the letter in Italian is kept at the National Library in Florence. Another letter of unknown authorship, sent from Lisbon to Nuremberg at about the same time, has survived. The letter contained a sketch of a rhino. Dürer, who had connections with the Portuguese trading post in Antwerp, had a chance to familiarize himself with the letter and the drawing. Not seeing the living rhino in person, Dürer made two drawings with a pen and ink. Engraving was made on the basis of the second drawing, as a result, a mirror image of the drawing was obtained.

In 1512, after Christmas, on the first day of May, the powerful king of Portugal, Emanuel, was brought to Lisbon a living beast from India, which they call a rhinoceros. This is what he looks like. Its color is similar to the color of a turtle shell, and it is densely covered with thick scales. And in size it is equal to an elephant, but its legs are shorter, and it is well protected. On the front of the nose, he has a strong horn, which he sharpens everywhere when he is among the stones. This beast is the mortal enemy of the elephant, and the elephant is very afraid of it. For wherever he meets him, this beast sticks its head between the front legs of an elephant and rips open his belly and kills him, and he cannot defend himself from him. For this beast is so armed that the elephant can do nothing to him. It is also said that the rhino is a fast, unpredictable and cunning beast.

Original text (German)

Nach Christiegeburt / 1513. Jar Adi 1. May hat man dem grossmechtigisten König Emanuel von Portugal / gen Lysabona aus India pracht / ain solch lebendig Thier. das nennen sie Rhinocerus / Das ist hie mit all seiner gestalt abconterfect. Es hat ein Farb wie ein gepsreckelte Schildkrot / und ist vom dicken schalen uberleget sehr fest / und ist in der gröss als der heillfandt / aber niderichter von baynen und sehr wehrhafftig es hat ein scharffstark horn ven zuod der der es bey staynen ist / das da ein Sieg Thir ist / des Heilffanten Todtfeyndt. Der Heillfandt fürchts fast ubel / den wo es Ihn ankompt / so laufft Ihm das Thir mit dem kopff zwischen die fordern bayn / und reist den Heilffanten unten am bauch auff / und er würget ihn / des mag er sich nicht erwehren. dann das Thier ist also gewapnet / das ihm der Jeilffandt [sic] nichts Thun kan / Sie sagen auch / das der Rhinocerus / Schnell / fraytig / und auch Lustig / sey.

- The inscription on the engraving of 1515

Engraving contains actual errors. On it, the rhino is covered with strong shields, like sheets of armor, has a collar on the neck, an integral chest plate. The seams of the armor look like they are riveted together. Dürer placed a curved horn on the back of a rhino, and covered its legs with scales. It is possible that in Portugal a set of armor was indeed created to fight the rhino with an elephant, and that the engraving depicts these armor.

The impression of armor could be caused by the folds of the skin of the Indian rhino. It is possible that the armor, along with other inconsistencies, was the result of a misunderstanding or imagination of the author. Dürer covered the body of the rhino, including the “armor,” with a honeycomb pattern. Perhaps this was an attempt to convey the appearance of rough and almost hairless skin, on which characteristic bumps covering the upper legs and shoulders are noticeable. It is possible that this pattern can display dermatitis caused by improper maintenance while traveling from India to Portugal.

Almost simultaneously with Dürer, an engraving of the rhino was made by Hans Burgkmayr from Augsburg . Burgkmire had contact with the merchants of Lisbon and Nuremberg, but it is unclear whether he had access to the letter or sketch that Durer used or saw with his own eyes the rhino. His work is more true. It lacks the most fantastic features inherent in the work of Dürer, and it also reproduces the chains that chained the rhino. Nevertheless, both in terms of art and popularity, it is inferior to the work of Dürer.

Only one print of Burgkmire’s work has survived, in contrast to the Dürer engraving, preserved in many copies. Durer issued the first version of the engraving in 1515. It is distinguished by the presence of five lines of text. These are reprints made after the death of Dürer, including two editions of the 1540s and the next two - the end of the XVI century . Later editions contain six lines of text.

Despite errors, the work remained popular for a long time and was considered a reliable image of a rhino until the end of the 18th century. It is possible that Dürer expected such success and deliberately chose wood as a material, which made it possible to reduce the cost of production and, consequently, increase the circulation. Illustrations of natural science texts were based on this engraving, including books such as Cosmography of Sebastian Münster (1544), Historia animalium Conrad Gessner (1551), Histoire of Foure-footed Beastes by Edward Topsel (1607), and many others. The rhinoceros that adorned the emblem of Alessandro Medici has a pronounced resemblance to the Dürer rhino.

At the base of the column, erected in Paris in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Saint-Denis in honor of the arrival of the new king of France, Henry the Second, a sculptural image of a rhinoceros, also based on the engraving of Dürer, was placed. A similar rhinoceros is depicted on a relief on one of the bronze western doors of the Leaning Cathedral of Pisa. Rhinos have become a popular motif of fine art and sculpture. The popularity of the engraving was not affected by the fact that for eight years, from 1580 to 1588, a living Indian rhinoceros was in Madrid (in this case, several prints of the rhinoceros engraved by Philip Galle in Antwerp in 1586, as well as derivatives from this drawing), nor the display of a living rhinoceros in London a century later (from 1684–86), as well as another after 1739.

The value of the engraving and its derivative works fell in the mid-end of the 18th century, due to the fact that more and more rhinos were brought to Europe. Naturalistic images, such as the life-size picture of the Clara rhino by Jean-Baptiste Udry and paintings by George Stubbs , began to supplant the old image of the rhino in the public mind. In particular, Udry's work served as the basis for illustrating Buffon 's Natural History.

Until the end of the 30s of the XX century, the image of Dürer appeared in German school textbooks as a reliable image of a rhino. In German, Indian rhinos are called shell rhinos. Thanks to the image of Durer, a rhino two and a half centuries was represented by animals dressed in armor ^[5] . The engraving inspired Dali to the sculpture “Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas”, which has been exhibited in the marina in the Spanish city of Marbella since 2004.

• Bedini, Silvano A. The Pope's Elephant. - Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1997 .-- ISBN 1857542770 . (particularly Chapter 5, “The Ill-Fated Rhinoceros”)
• Clarke, TH The Rhinoceros from Dürer to Stubbs: 1515-1799. - London: 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 0-684-83728-5 (particularly p. 201-209, The Boilerplate Rhino , previously published in this “Natural Acts” column in Outside magazine, June 1993)
• The Story of Süleyman. Celebrity Elephants and other exotica in Renaissance Portugal , Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, Zurich, Switzerland, 2010, ISBN 978-1-61658-821-2

• Durer's works