On 20 May 1515 a rhinoceros was unloaded at Lisbon. It had come from Gujarat, a gift from Sultan Muzafar II to Afonso de Albuquerque, and from Albuquerque to King Manuel I of Portugal. No living rhinoceros had been seen in Europe since the third century. Rome had known them; the intervening thirteen hundred years had not.
Manuel kept it a few months, staged a fight between it and one of his elephants (the elephant fled), and then sent the animal on to Pope Leo X. The ship went down in a storm off the Ligurian coast in early 1516. The rhinoceros, chained to the deck, drowned.
The letter
Before any of that, a merchant in Lisbon wrote north to a colleague in Nuremberg describing the animal, and enclosed a sketch. The letter and drawing reached Albrecht Dürer, then forty-four and at the height of his powers. He never travelled to Lisbon. He never saw the rhinoceros.
He cut the block anyway.
What he got wrong
Almost everything about the surface. The Indian rhinoceros does have deep skin folds that suggest plating, but Dürer turned them into riveted armour, with a scalloped gorget at the neck and what look like decorative bosses along the flank. He scaled the legs like a lizard's. He added a small twisted horn at the shoulder that no rhinoceros has ever possessed. The animal stands like a piece of siege engineering.
And the printed text above the image compounds it. Dürer reports that the rhinoceros is the mortal enemy of the elephant, that it sharpens its horn on stones before a fight, and that it kills the elephant by running its horn into the belly. This is Pliny, repeated across fifteen centuries, and it is not true.
Why it did not matter
The woodcut went through at least eight editions in Dürer's lifetime and kept being reprinted for two hundred and fifty years after his death. It appeared in natural history textbooks into the late eighteenth century. When Europeans finally saw living rhinoceroses again — one toured the continent in the 1740s, and was widely drawn from life — illustrators kept reverting to Dürer's version, because it was the one everybody recognised.
An accurate drawing existed and lost. The inaccurate one had authority, and authority is not the same thing as accuracy.
Why I keep it
Because it is the clearest case I know of an image defeating a fact, and because the defeat took two and a half centuries to reverse. That is worth having on a wall in a century that has its own version of the problem.
And because as a piece of cutting it is extraordinary. Look at the hatching where the shoulder plate meets the neck: a dozen tones built from nothing but the width of a line and the space beside it. Dürer had never seen the animal, but he had seen armour, and he knew exactly how light behaves on a curved metal surface.
The sheet
The impression reproduced here is held by the Kupferstichkabinett of the Kunstmuseum Basel, inventory K.9.165, and measures 23.1 × 29.9 cm. We print the whole sheet, including the letterpress text — the errors and all. Cropping to the animal alone would make a decorative animal print out of a document.
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