In the year 1515, no one in Europe had seen a rhinoceros since the Roman Empire withdrew a thousand years earlier. Well, maybe except for a few sailors and other world travelers. But that year King Manuel I of Portugal was given a gift of a rhino from a menagerie in India. While the privately-owned beast was seen by relatively few people in Portugal, it was the talk of Europe even before it arrived, and everyone wanted to know what a rhinoceros looked like.
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Albrecht Dürer, a German painter and printmaker living in Nuremberg, was captivated by the strangeness of the animal. So he began to a prepare a pen sketch relying on the written description and the sketch made by an unknown artist. Dürer never saw the animal himself, but the woodcut he prepared became so famous that for two centuries it was the only rhinoceros Europeans ever saw.
But Dürer’s representation of the rhinoceros was not anatomically correct. He put armor like plates on the animal’s body, complete with rivets along the seams. He placed a small twisted horn on its back and gave the animal scaly legs. Despite its anatomical inaccuracies, Dürer’s fanciful creation became so popular that three hundred years later, European illustrators continued to publish Dürer’s woodcut, even after they had seen the real animal.
You have to admit it’s a fascinating piece of art. Was Dürer trying to be artistic or as representational as he could? Read about the afterlife of Dürer’s rhino and the real rhinoceros named Genda that inspired it at Amusing Planet.
Source: neatorama