He looked exactly like a Noah’s Ark Rhinoceros, but of course much bigger. THE RHINOCEROS SKINIn those days the Rhinoceros’s skin fitted him quite tight. But just as he was going to eat it there came down to the beach from the Altogether Uninhabited Interior one Rhinoceros with a horn on his nose, two piggy eyes, and few manners. It was indeed a Superior Comestible (that’s magic), and he put it on stove because he was allowed to cook on the stove, and he baked it and he baked it till it was all done brown and smelt most sentimental. And one day he took flour and water and currants and plums and sugar and things, and made himself one cake which was two feet across and three feet thick. And the Parsee lived by the Red Sea with nothing but his hat and his knife and a cooking-stove of the kind that you must particularly never touch. ONCE upon a time, on an uninhabited island on the shores of the Red Sea, there lived a Parsee from whose hat the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour. THE RHINOCEROS UPDATEYou should visit Browse Happy and update your internet browser today! Even as other living rhinoceroses made their way through Europe in the subsequent centuries, Dürer’s exceptional but somewhat anatomically inaccurate rendering remained popular, a testament to his remarkable treatment of an animal that he never lived to see.The embedded audio player requires a modern internet browser. The woodcuts were in such high demand that they continued to be printed and distributed after Dürer’s death. As a relatively inexpensive way of disseminating information, the finished print offered the opportunity for those near and far to see a depiction of an animal that they could previously only have imagined. A skilled craftsman probably carved the block. He then copied over the drawing onto a woodblock, making slight modifications. In an inscription below the drawing, Dürer recorded information about the rhinoceros and its arrival in Lisbon. Dürer first made a sketch of the animal in pen and ink. In the subsequent months, Dürer would likely have read a description of the rhinoceros, and he may have even seen another artist’s renderings.įor Dürer, news of the rhinoceros would have sparked both his creative and journalistic impulses. The animal’s appearance in Lisbon was such a momentous event that it was chronicled by many. The rhinoceros endured a long journey, transported in a ship filled with spices. Sultan Muzafar II, the ruler of present-day Gujarat, had offered the Indian rhino as a gift to the king of Portugal. In 1515, for the first time in a millennia, a rhinoceros stepped foot in Europe. It was not uncommon for Dürer to go out of his way to observe a new species, traveling throughout his life to see a baboon, a lion, and even a beached whale. These studies were sometimes developed for a print or a painting, but many of them are exquisite works of art in their own right. If this rhinoceros looks a little funny, with whiskers under his chin and scale-covered plates, it is because Albrecht Dürer, the great Northern Renaissance artist and thinker who created this print, had never actually seen one.ĭürer was a deeply curious artist, and he made many sketches and watercolors of birds, fish, and other animals. In the age of Instagram, it is easy to forget that there was a time-in fact, most of time-when information about what an animal looked like was passed between continents by sketches and word of mouth.
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