The 40 × 50 cm giclée print of Dürer's Rhinoceros at original size, unframed, white border, on 200 gsm fine art paper

Albrecht Dürer – The Rhinoceros, 1515 | Giclée Print

40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Original size, 1:1
CHF 59.00
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The 40 × 50 cm giclée print of Dürer's Rhinoceros at original size, unframed, white border, on 200 gsm fine art paper
  • The 40 × 50 cm giclée print of Dürer's Rhinoceros at original size, unframed, white border, on 200 gsm fine art paper
  • Dürer's Rhinoceros as a 90 × 60 cm giclée print, unframed, 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Close view at actual print size: the woodcut lines and the paper tone of the 1515 sheet
  • The 40 × 50 cm giclée print of Dürer's Rhinoceros at original size, unframed, white border, on 200 gsm fine art paper
  • Dürer's Rhinoceros as a 90 × 60 cm giclée print, unframed, 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Close view at actual print size: the woodcut lines and the paper tone of the 1515 sheet
Albrecht Dürer – The Rhinoceros, 1515 | Giclée Print

Albrecht Dürer – The Rhinoceros, 1515 | Giclée Print

CHF 59.00
Size

In May 1515 a rhinoceros arrived in Lisbon, a gift from the Sultan of Cambay to King Manuel I of Portugal. Word travelled north with a letter and a rough sketch. Dürer, in Nuremberg, never laid eyes on the animal. He cut this woodcut from the description alone.

He got things wrong. The plates of skin become riveted armour. A second small horn sprouts from the shoulder. The legs are scaled like a lizard's. And none of it mattered: for the next two hundred and fifty years, European schoolbooks drew their rhinoceros from this sheet rather than from life. It outlasted the animal itself, which drowned off the Italian coast on its way to the Pope.

It is the finest example I know of an image defeating a fact — and a reminder that a picture can be wrong and still be true to the thing it wants to show.

Scale
Most print shops stretch any image onto any sheet without comment. We do not. This sheet is offered at the size Dürer cut it, and once enlarged, with the factor named.

Original: 30.1 × 23.8 cm / 11.9 × 9.4 in — The Cleveland Museum of Art, Inv. 1993.9
40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Original size, the sheet as Dürer cut it, 1:1
60 × 90 cm / 23.6 × 35.4 in — Enlarged, 2.1× original

The sheets are metric. The inch figures are exact conversions, not US nominal sizes — each sheet sits inside the matching standard frame, 16 × 20 in and 24 × 36 in, with a few millimetres to spare.

Neither is cropped. Dürer's German letterpress text of 1515 is part of the woodcut and is reproduced in full on both.

Provenance
Woodcut with letterpress, 1515; image 23.8 × 30.1 cm / 9.4 × 11.9 in.
Impression reproduced: The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund, Inv. 1993.9 (Open Access, CC0).
Public domain worldwide.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

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