The English version of the Rhino lecture by István Orosz presented
yesterday at Műcsarnok/Budapest (translation by Péter Balikó Lengyel)
A Rhino Remembered
Who
would not have heard of the formidable tempest on the Ligurian Sea which
claimed the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley? In almost precisely the same place,
near the mouth of Spezia Bay off the coast of Porto Venere, another storm had wrecked
another vessel a quarter century before – O
Wild West Wind! The misfortune took place on a day following the 24th
of January 1516, almost exactly five hundred years ago. The most famous victim on
board – pace Shelley – was an animal,
an Indian rhinoceros, to whom this essay is dedicated. We will find out shortly
what on earth this beast was doing on board, tossed about by the raging sea.
But let us first see his curriculum vitae
and a modest reasoning which I hope will explain why I accord such significance
to an odd-toed ungulate that found a watery grave, and perhaps even what he
might have to do with me or, rather, with my professional interests.
The beast probably hailed from
Gujarat in Northwest India. Sultan Muzaffar II is on record to have given a
gift of the by then fully grown rhino bull he called Ganda to the Portuguese military commander Diego Fernandes de Beja,
in commemoration of “establishing mutually beneficial diplomatic contact” –
politicalese for the sultan’s polite rejection of Portugal’s overtures aimed at
colonization. Beja received the gift on May 18th, and the beast
landed in Goa on September 15th, after the commander, bent on
getting rid of this evidence of his failed mission, had dispatched it to Afonso
de Albuquerque, Viceroy of the Portuguese territories in India. Afonso, himself
no novice to the symbolic language of diplomacy, did not cotton to Ganda
either, and resolved to grab the first opportunity to relay the gift to his King,
Manuel I. That opportunity presented itself early the following year when the
next ship was to sail out for the motherland. Specific details of this trip
have been handed down to us. Under the command of Francisco Pereira Coutinho,
the caravel named Our Lady of Mercy traversed the Indian Ocean, skirted the
Cape of Good Hope, then briefly called at St. Helena and the Azores Islands to
feed the royal gift and take him for a walk. After a swift journey under lively
winds that took all of 120 days, the caravel entered the port of Lisbon on May
20th and anchored by the site where the foundation works for the
Belém Tower had begun a few days previously. It would beggar belief to say that
the timing of this homecoming was a coincidence: May 20th had been
declared Navigation Day in Portugal 17 years before, when Vasco Da Gama reached
India. The tower about to be built in honor of his achievement would have some
of the stones supporting the cornice carved in the image of a rhino’s head, these
still visible today.
It was the first time, if not in
history than certainly in long centuries, that a rhinoceros set foot on the
European continent. (Ancient Roman authors and coins attest to the possibility
of occasional rhino presence in Antiquity.) Early in the summer of 1515, news
of the unique beast’s arrival spread like wildfire, probably owing in part to
the massive cult in medieval Christianity of the mysterious unicorn, the
unbridled creature that could only be tamed and rendered docile as a lamb if breastfed
by an immaculate virgin. Indeed, the man of the Middle Ages had no difficulty
transcending the striking discrepancy between the graceful heraldic animal
often seen in miniatures and the hulking newcomer, and quickly came to regard
the two as one and the same. True enough, science was not much help in making a
rigorous distinction. Even a description of the monokeros by Pliny the Elder, widely considered the foremost authority
on the subject, did not readily lend itself to telling a rhinoceros from a
unicorn: “…[it] has a body like a horse,
a head like a deer, feet like an elephant, a tail like a boar; it has a deep
bellow, a single black horn two cubits long projecting from the middle of its
forehead.” King Manuel, who alternately believed and distrusted his scientists,
decided to get to the bottom of the legend himself. While he understandably
failed in his attempts to find an immaculate virgin who would agree to
breastfeed the beast, the fact that he kept several elephants in his court menagerie
put him in a better position to verify Pliny’s claim, advanced in another
passage of Naturalis Historia, about
the irreconcilable enmity between the rhinoceros and the elephant.
The experiment was arranged to take
place on January 3, the Feast of Trinity. On this occasion, the rhino faced a
young bull from Manuel’s elephant stable in a makeshift arena. Happily, the
showdown produced no bloodbath as the two animals, frightened to death by the
huge crowd, apparently had no inclination whatsoever to help solve the
“scientific” problem, whatever it was worth. They simply halted at a safe
distance from one another, making a show of giving off a few huffs and puffs
and the occasional snort. Then, when the rhino stamped its feet briefly, the
elephant thought the better of it and bolted for safety, leaving its horned
opponent to be declared the winner.
Sitting in the audience was a
Moravian named Valentim Fernandes, a translator, printer and book publisher who
had been living in Lisbon for the past twenty years. He was positively
electrified by the sight of the rare beast in the flesh, for the very good
reason that it was he who had translated, printed and published Marco Polo’s
Asian travelogue in which mention was made of a strange horned creature he
suspected might be the same as the royal rhino. To be sure, what Marco Polo set
his eyes upon could not have been a unicorn, if for nothing else than for the
simple reason that it had two horns. In any event, Marco Polo must have had a
hard time picturing the boar-headed, armor-skinned brute rolling in the mud as
the docile creature taking a virgin’s nipple… Posterity, always wise in
hindsight, solved the puzzle: What the Venetian seafarer encountered was not an
Indian rhinoceros but a specimen of the Sumatran subspecies, equipped with two
horns rather than one. This second horn will create a bit of a mess for our own
investigation as well, as we are going to see shortly. The good Moravian, who
corresponded regularly with his German colleagues, wasted no time in writing
down his impressions of the beast. He may have even slipped a sketch into the
envelope which ended up on the hands of Albrecht Dürer in Nuremberg. A similar
message found another distinguished German artist, Hans Burgkmair in Augsburg. Both
men duly got down to work to fashion their own rhinoceros. Fueled by the glory
of becoming the first to create the effigy of an unknown creature, and also not
indifferent to the potential profitability of the enterprise, they opted for a
woodcut, which lent itself to producing prints in large numbers. The German masters,
however, were beaten to the task by Giovanni Giacomo Penni, a Florentine physician,
who published a “scientific” treatise in verse about the rhinoceros merely
forty days after the “battle” in Lisbon (and 54 days after the rhino had landed
on the shore), under the title The Shape,
the Nature and the Way of the Rhinoceros brought by the Captain of the
Portuguese King's Armada and other beautiful things brought from the new
insulars. Even more surprising, perhaps, than the sheer promptness of the
publication was the unusually high number of copies printed, if we are to
believe the only extant copy, which bears the serial number of 2260 and
indicates, in handwriting, the name of its owner as Fernando Columbo – the
younger son of Christopher Columbus. The cover features a woodcut we may safely
regard as the first “authentic” representation of our rhinoceros. Lacking in fine
artistic touches as it is, the woodcut would be difficult to demonstrate to
have been modeled on the same sketch that inspired the German masters, but for
a small point that makes us pause (and which will become germane to this
narrative later on): The fore legs of the beast are bound together, just as
they are in the illustration by Burgkmair. This is not something one just makes
up off the top of his head. If these two depicted the rhino with its fore legs
in shackles, then this is how it must have been in the sketch sent to them. On
the other hand, it is also clear that no beast in shackles would have had a
fighting chance against an elephant. This makes it reasonable to assume that
the person from whom both artists took their cue was hardly Valentim Fernandes,
who had seen the rhinoceros in Manuel’s makeshift arena, but someone who had
encountered it earlier, quite possibly when it disembarked the ship.
But let us trace our steps back to
Dürer, whose drawing and, even more importantly, woodcut was, after all, what
made the Rhinoceros famous as we know it. It is indeed Dürer’s iconic
representation of the animal which forms the focus of our inquiry. The brown
pen and ink drawing is kept in the British Museum, along with several proofs of
the cut from various editions. In fact, so many prints of Dürer’s woodcut survive
that one may actually purchase one for studying in the comfort of one’s home,
although that intimacy will not come cheap. In January 2013, a specimen from
the first edition (there were at least seven posthumous editions) fetched
865,500 dollars at an auction held by Christie’s in New York. This rather
handsome amount represents a radical shift in the collectors’ appreciation of
Dürer’s oeuvre, given that it surpassed the hammer prices achieved by copper
engravings of far greater elaboration and deeper philosophical content, although
admittedly smaller in size – not that this should matter, should it? –,
including Melencolia (530,500
dollars) and Adam and Eve (662,500
dollars). This shift is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that the
woodcut, unlike the copperplates which the artist engraved himself, was
finalized by a master woodblock cutter, albeit obviously based on Dürer's
drawing and adorned by his initials.
The claim that this is “an accurate
representation” of the animal, as the banner text over the woodcut image
insists, should be taken with a grain salt. The creature’s appearance must have
changed considerably through its various incarnations, even if no intentional
alteration of the image can be presumed. Valentim Fernandes glimpsed the beast
fighting or getting ready to fight an opponent – hardly an ideal situation for
objective observation – which may have intensified the bellicose traits of the
spectacle as transposed into text (the letter) and image (the sketch). Since
the banner text itself emphasizes belligerence, it is hardly surprising that
Dürer set about executing the drawing with a war machine in mind. Having
completed the drawing and reworked it somewhat to better accommodate the
cumbersome technology of the woodcut, perhaps even copying it on to the wooden
plank himself, he handed it to the woodblock cutter, who could not help but
make subtle alterations to the master’s lines despite his best efforts to trace
them faithfully. One might say he andreälized
it to a point, for the formschneyder
was most likely the same Hieronymus Andreä with whom Dürer worked on a regular
basis at the time, producing, among other works, The Triumphal Arch of Emperor Maximilian, their largest
collaboration. Returning from a trip to the Netherlands in 1521, Dürer made his
colleague the symbolic yet practical gift of “an exceedingly large horn” to
remind him of their joint achievement the Rhinoceros,
which had attained genuine success and popularity, and also to hint in jest to
the rapidly spreading rumor that the rhinoceros horn was the most potent aphrodisiac
of all time. Keep that enormous horn in mind; we shall take it out shortly.
For now, let us return to the
genesis of the famous cut and read to the end the inscription on top from which
we have singled out a brief quotation before:
On the first of May in the year 1513 AD [sic], the
powerful King of Portugal, Manuel of Lisbon, brought such a living animal from
India, called the rhinoceros. This is an accurate representation. It is the
color of a speckled tortoise, and is almost entirely covered with thick scales.
It is the size of an elephant but has shorter legs and is almost invulnerable.
It has a strong pointed horn on the tip of its nose, which it sharpens on
stones. It is the mortal enemy of the elephant. The elephant is afraid of the
rhinoceros, for, when they meet, the rhinoceros charges with its head between
its front legs and rips open the elephant's stomach, against which the elephant
is unable to defend itself. The rhinoceros is so well-armed that the elephant
cannot harm it. It is said that the rhinoceros is fast, impetuous and cunning.
The text,
albeit specifying the wrong date, does make an initial reference to the specimen
in Lisbon, but then proceeds to present the beast in general terms. As such, it
is more indebted to Pliny than to the individual rhino that had served as the
subject of the woodcut. Although the description quotes directly from Naturalis Historia, the image itself
hints at an overwrought imagination at work behind the aloof objectivism of
natural science. Or is it rather we who unwittingly look for those signs so
typical of the age, particularly in German-speaking areas? Is it that the Teutonic
soul, predisposed toward the eerie, is better suited to believe that the path
to salvation leads through the circles of Hell, and that the host of
forgiveness tastes sweeter after one has emptied the bitter cup of abomination?
Or is it simply that the Germanic peoples have a more thoroughly documented history
of affiliation with monsters? In any event, unprecedented indeed were the
apocalyptic nightmares and throngs of feverish demons that invaded the studios
of German painters and graphic artists starting in the second half of the 15th
century. Schongauer, Wolgemut, Hopfer, Baldung, Bosch and Brueghel all come to
mind. And let us recall that the standard tempters of Saint Anthony, who had
just embarked on a spectacular career as a favorite subject of the fine arts, included
the unicorn, which sometimes wore its horn on its nose rather than on its
forehead (as it did in an altarpiece by the freak-specialist Niklaus Manuel
Deutsch) or donned rhinoceros skin (as Grünewald depicted it).
Although both Burgkmair and Dürer
qualified as highly trained bestiologists in their own right, they were also
known for their penchant for natural history. Shortly before that notorious
envelope was delivered to his hand, Burgkmair had finished cutting in the wood
block an Indian elephant as part of the Triumphal
March of Emperor Maximilian, and was likely gearing up for the triptych Saint John in Patmos, which was to go
down in the annals of art history as the first authentic depiction of tropical
flora and fauna. While Dürer’s animal portraits – hare, stag beetle, bat, owl,
deer head, bluebird, grosbeak, crab – must have been well-known, it was probably
owing to his deep, sometimes childishly overheated fondness of all creatures
exotic that he was among the selected recipients of the letter. He cut a wild
boar, drew a huge stranded whale, painted a whiskered walrus head, and
generally horded everything he could lay his hands on that he thought hailed
from faraway lands. Goethe once reprimanded him for recklessly abandoning his
great works for mere parrots.
Perusing his Diary of a Trip to the Netherlands one encounters a rapid
succession of relics from newly discovered lands and the strange creatures
inhabiting them. Quite conceivably, Dürer was at this time preoccupied with
plans along the lines of Leonardo’s collage technique, whereby the Italian
master – allegedly by Vasari, for the work did not survive – created a horrific
Medusa head by fitting a round shield with snakes, frogs, lizards, bats and
other bizarre critters, which coalesced into a lurid face when viewed from a
distance. The method, which universal art history would later link to the name
of Arcimboldo, influenced many including Dürer, who tried his hands at the
genre a few times. His View of Arco,
for instance, lends itself to visualizing several human faces simultaneously,
provided you stare at it long enough and of course with sufficient empathy. What
emerges from Dürer’s travel log is a long inventory of naturaliae, rare
animals, and diverse exotica, purchased for money, bartered, or received as a
gift, including the already mentioned enormous horn as well as a huge fish
bone, coconuts, horns of oxen and water buffalo, a miniature skull carved from
ivory, a small live monkey, gigantic fish scales, shells of tortoise, snails,
and clams, white coral, a musk ball cut from the musk-deer, a shield made from
candied fish skin, lemon peel, elk claws, a stone pine cone, a fish fin, bamboo
sticks, parrot plumes, dried fish and capers. Although tight-fisted in every
other way, Dürer accumulated an expensive collection of curiosities large
enough for him not to carry on his person, and had to hire a forwarding agent
to deliver his new treasures home to Nuremberg crossing no fewer than 32
various customs jurisdictions. The artist must have intended this collection as
a catalogued portfolio which he could draw on later and retrieve any item that
could aid him in executing certain details of a hitherto unknown creature.
Boasting a good command of Latin,
Dürer probably often thought of Horace’s Ars
poetica, perhaps even quoting for himself the vitriolic opening lines of
the poem which ridicule precisely his brand of creating art by cobbling
together mismatched body parts:
If a painter had chosen to set a human head
On a horse’s neck, covered a melding of limbs,
Everywhere, with multi-coloured plumage, so
That what was a lovely woman, at the top,
Ended repulsively in the tail of a black fish:
Asked to a viewing, could you stifle laughter, my
friends?
(Translation
by A.S. Kline)
Yet all
these curiosities that took Europe by storm in the wake of the great
geographical discoveries clearly overwrote the classical canon. Dürer was no
less likely than the next man to doubt that zoological miracles would continue
to pour in. Since the day he was born the number of animal species known to
inhabit the Earth had doubled, and he had reason to believe this number would
have doubled over again by the time he died. A died-in-the-wool naturalist may
have harbored reservations about the supposedly infinite number of permutations
in the living world, but nothing like this could have occurred to the true
believer, for whom questioning the endless variety of species would have been
tantamount to doubting the infinite power of the Creator. In a work entitled The
History of Four-footed Beasts
(1607), Edward Topsell, an English scientist from the no-man’s land separating
natural history from theology, attempted to popularize his theory about cross-breeds,
positing, among other assumptions, that the giraffe descended from the camel
and leopard. Such conjectures inherently led to the observation that the
combinatory process was unstoppable, the potential number of chimeras infinite,
the sky the only limit.
The
Rhinoceros woodcut wears its technique on its sleeve; all we need to do is
revisit the text borrowed from Pliny. It is the color of a speckled
tortoise, and is almost entirely covered with thick scales. Dürer’s collection
was hardly short of tortoise shells; he only had to find the right drawer where
he kept a speckled one. It is the size of an elephant but has shorter legs
and is almost invulnerable. Elephants were not unheard of or unseen in
Europe at the time; Manuel, for one, maintained a menagerie of several
specimens as we have seen. We will touch upon Hanno, the white elephant in due
course. For now let it suffice to hypothesize that a few drawings or cuts
representing elephants could have found their way to Nuremberg. If only those
legs could be shortened and covered in fish scales (let’s find some in one of
those drawers), the image of the beast could transport us smack in the middle
of the distant Indies! It has a strong pointed horn on the tip of its nose,
which it sharpens on stones. The collection has plenty of horns (of ox,
bison, buffalo) to choose from, but if something more spectacular is called
for, there must be a narwhal tusk or a pointy pine cone somewhere in there…
Let’s see which one will show to better effect. The elephant is afraid of
the rhinoceros, for, when they meet, the rhinoceros charges with its head
between its front legs and rips open the elephant's stomach, against which the
elephant is unable to defend itself. Those tortoise shells, if fit together
deftly, will make a credible image of a massive, robust creature, whose special
tactic of warfare – dashing back and forth between the legs of an elephant –
would seem to benefit from a sharp horn protruding from its back. It was
probably this consideration that resulted in that second horn on the rhino’s
withers, which quickly became the hallmark of the Dürerian representation. What
it resembles most is the shell of the door snail family (Clausiliidae),
which is not unlike the twisted single horn donned by unicorns in typical
renditions.
I
promised to come back to Valentim Fernandes in connection with the second horn.
Well, the good translator was certain that the animal he saw at the court of
Ribeira Palace was the same that he had read about in Marco Polo’s account. He
was not in the least swayed in his conviction by the minor discrepancy that the
Venetian roamer mentioned two horns while the specimen in Lisbon seemed to wear
only one. That second horn, for all he knew, may have broken off in the heat of
another fracas… Or he may have simply visualized the ancillary horn in his
mind’s eye. It is also conceivable that he very deliberately supplied the
sketch dispatched to Nuremberg with the second horn allegedly observed by Polo.
This was, after all, how science made progress, was it not? The strange add-on
horn may be the most oft-cited quirk of the woodcut, but it is far from being
the only peculiarity about it and, as we have seen, was not even necessarily
Dürer’s own invention. That strange gorget, the precisely riveted seams
connecting the individual armor plates, the relief motif hinting at the
position of the ribs, the hard scales covering legs, and the sheer
decorativeness of the animal’s appearance make it impossible to rule out that
the rare beast was indeed dressed in armor for that showdown in Lisbon. Yet in
view of the mission the beast was to be given to help bring prosperity to
Portugal – a task which will soon force me to make yet another detour – it
would have seemed odd to adopt any precautionary measure to bolster its already
well-rpotected bodily integrity. Then again, the rhino was to triumph in the
duel in Pliny’s assessment. It is another matter whether the elephant
subscribed to this view.
The
longer I stare at the woodcut the less likely it seems to me that I am looking
at a “dressed-up” rhinoceros. This is not to say, of course, that Dürer thought
so, too. In any case, neither the letter he received nor the sketch
accompanying it warranted such an inference. Dürer set about working in good
faith, taking without second thought those armor rivets for hardened warts of
the skin, the greaves for scales, and the bayonet fitted to the animal’s nape
for a second horn. Dürer may never have been to Portugal, but he was certainly
familiar with Italy, so he must have known a thing or two about ceremonies in
the Latin world, where decked-out animals were not only ubiquitous but central
to the cultural tradition. Ultimately, however, Dürer was the child of the
cool-headed North (and also of the Puritanical East owing to his Hungarian
ancestry), so it probably never crossed his mind that the animal in the sketch
could be wearing a costume of sorts.
If
the above conclusion is correct – that is, if the rhino in the sketch wears ornate
armor plates rather than being presented naked in the flesh – this would
suggest that the image advertises the horn vs. trunk fight of June 3rd.
If it does, it raises the problem of genre, for it removes the rhinoceros from
the category of bestiary engravings (or, more precisely, from that of illustrations
in natural history) and places it in the genre of ephemera as a veritable
foreshadowing of the modern billboard. In this view, the composition combining
a lemma (text) and imago (image) as was customary in emblemata
sheets, must be seen as promoting the spectacle in the palace of Lisbon (post
factum as that advertisement may have been). This same dual structure would
inform the street billboards emerging in the 19th century.
Although
our previous reasoning – namely that Dürer was unaware of dealing with a
costumed rhino – would seem to lead to the easy conclusion that he did not
intend the print as an instance of ephemera, the question is definitely
worth dwelling on. So called “applied graphic art” is normally practiced on
commission. Did Dürer make his woodcut to order, or to his own pleasure and satisfaction?
His triumph from the previous year, Melencolia, is a genuinely
independent work, identified by Panofsky as a spiritual self-portrait, and it
was obviously not made to order. On the other hand, Dürer spent much of the
year 1515 working on The Triumphal Arch, commissioned by Emperor
Maximilian. We do not know if the person who delivered the letter and the
sketch from Lisbon to Dürer specifically placed an order for the work, but the
possibility cannot be ruled out. Indeed, one of the financiers on the artist’s
radar screen would soon flaunt the woodcut as his own property. In the fifth
book of Pantagruel, Rabelais mentions a man named Harry Clerberg who
showed him the portrait of a rhinoceros. Since this Harry Clerberg was none
other than Hans Kleeberger of Nuremberg, Dürer’s neighbor and model before he
moved to Lyon, as well as the son-in-law of his friend Pircheimer, we can be
certain that the image described by Rabelais was the woodcut we are concerned
with here. A man always on the road, Kleeberger is as likely a candidate as any
for having brought news of the rhino to Nuremberg, and, as one of the
wealthiest bankers in Europe, called “the good German” by the French on account
of his charity, equally plausible to have been in the position to commission a
drawing from Dürer.
A
piece of autonomous graphic art, or an expert illustration in natural history?
A voluntary work or one made to order? The animal in the flesh or clad in armor
plates, ready for the battle? I have been known to argue, and even to set it in
writing, that the life of a work of art would be incomplete without taking into
account all opinions ever attached to it, be they mutually contradictory views,
arbitrary misinterpretations, or lopsided distortions. Yet now I would not mind
it if I could collect the branching threads of this draft and point them toward
a single conclusion. Perhaps we shall be better off if we try and strip the
work of all accrued knowledge and added information, and view the image in its
stark intrinsic reality.
The
paper sheet measures 23.5 by 29.8 cm, roughly the size of standard A4 paper,
and was printed in black printer’s ink from a letterpress wood block. It
consists of three clearly distinct parts: the profile image of the animal
viewed from the right; the inscription in capital letters RHINOCERUS; and an
explanatory note striving to describe the animal with the succinctness of a
dictionary entry. These three features stand for three markedly different ways
of approaching the same subject, and in rather thought-provoking ways. Do these
three approaches overlap completely? Do they faithfully represent each other?
Or are they juxtaposed to jointly represent something else, an elusive notion
that emerges in us, and only in us, as we gaze at, read about, and mull over
the idea of the rhinoceros? I venture the hypothesis that, instead of focusing
on the aesthetic aspects of execution, Dürer here is preoccupied with grasping
the very concept of expression. In other words, he transcends the subject of
representation to attempt define the language thereof. In a manner of saying,
we witness an artist straying into the field of art philosophy. But is he by so
doing going astray? Does he entangle himself in the net of tautology by
mistake and accident, or has he developed a sincere interest in transgressing
the disciplinary border on purpose? Before essaying an answer, let me recall
that the “Daedalian master,” as Karel van Mander called him, had an equal
command of the visual and verbal idioms, and was fascinated with ways of making
the two media correlate or bleed into one another. He touches on this in his Praise
of Painting (1512) and reiterates the idea in Food for Apprentice
Painters (1513) as follows: “What you see is always more believable than
what you hear. But what you can both hear and see is easier to understand and
will keep longer in memory. This is why I fuse word with image, so that the
whole may be better remembered.”
Gombrich’s
notion of the “conceptual image,” understood as the opposite of the “visual
image” – that is, the notion that the artist does not draw what he sees but
what he can draw – applies self-evidently to the case at hand, given that Dürer
never saw a rhinoceros in the flesh, and even the assumption that he saw a
sketch of the animal is supported by no evidence other than by the overall
precision of the representation, which is remarkable despite a few obvious
inaccuracies. While drawing the image of a beast he had never seen but knew
full well to exist, Dürer had to realize that the tension between a work of art
and reality was just as powerful as that between reality and the words intended
to convey it. It dawned on him that representation by language and representation
by images are two aspects of the same thing, of the reality, he might say,
which some Greek authors argued could only be approached through such aspects
or projections at best, while most of the time we are relegated to groping
around among diverse shadows and mirror images. The “handy” – because easily
rendered – reality of stag beetles, bats and hares was suddenly called into
question and yielded to a “conceptual” depiction from multiple directions as
the safer solution, which Dürer now attempted for the first time in his
Rhinoceros. A proto-conceptual work indeed, as those well-versed in the art of
the second half of the 20th century might say, thinking of something
like Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs. Widely recognized as the
epitome of the Conceptual art movement, this latter work, so notorious that it
borders on a cult classic, consists of a real chair, a life-size photograph of
it, and a mounted
photographic enlargement of the dictionary definition of “chair.” But where is
the “real chair” here? – one might counter the proposed parallel between Kosuth
and Dürer, pointing out that Dürer’s tautology is not threefold but
two-and-a-half fold at best, since the woodcut juxtaposes a visual depiction to
two verbal representations, moreover that the referent is missing, because a
tangible, three-dimensional rhino is not part of the equation. You want a real
rhinoceros? How about a metonymic part of it? At this juncture, let us recall the
reportedly huge horn Dürer brought from the Netherlands as a gift for his formschneyder,
Hieronymus Andreä. Europe may not have seen a rhinoceros in the flesh, but the
occasional rhino horn had already found its way to the continent to occupy
pride of place in many a Wanderkammer, or to transmit the virile vehemence
of its former owner as an expensive aphrodisiac. Although we have no knowledge
that either the xylographer or the designer stood the horn next to the image as
it was drawn and cut, it is without a doubt that the juxtaposition transpired
mentally, on the level of a thought experiment – which, as we know, takes
precedence over the finished work in the eyes of any conceptualist worth his salt.
Perhaps
it is not beside the point to mention another, less conspicuous detail – a sort
of “secret sign” if you will – which forms an equally important part of the
complex whole of the work: a watermark. The paper chosen by Dürer and Andreä
for the prints reveals the image of an anchor set in a circle if held up
against the light. The original symbolism of this watermark (security,
fidelity, faith) as commonly used by the papermakers of the era is, in this
instance, overwritten by the thematic application, as the anchor alludes to the
animal’s arrival by sea. Now, the quadruple constellation of rhino horn, rhino
image, rhino entry and rhino watermark is a combination with which even the
most seasoned concept-art connoisseurs cannot have a bone to pick with!
The
phenomenon of art would be placed in a new context nearly five centuries later,
vindicating Kosuth’s dictum which holds that pronouncements on and exegeses of art
are indistinguishable from art itself – to put it more simply, that the
problems of art are essentially linguistic in nature. Kosuth’s tripartite work
is not complete without the fourth element, the seemingly trite title of One
and Three Chairs. In other words, the single chair as a concept is
authenticated by the three phenomenological incarnations in which it is made to
appear to us. If it appeared to us in one of its forms only, it would not
deserve to be called a chair, just as the pipe in Magritte’s 1929 painting The
Treachery of Images can not properly be called a pipe, no matter how
alluringly it evokes the pipest pipe ever seen on a tobacconist’s shop sign.
Think about it: If you placed a real pipe next to the painting, you would
quickly come round to the view expressed in the inscription therein: “Ceci
n'est pas une pipe.” If I want to further elaborate the distinction between
visual and linguistic representation, I might as well start by pointing out
that the visual image (such as Dürer’s woodcut) and the linguistic
representation (Pliny’s description), each a systematic arrangement of black
lines and spots on white paper, are much more akin to one another than either
has in common with that thing of entirely different dimensions, weight, color, smell,
temperature, feel and dynamics which goes by the name of rhinoceros.
Rather
than simply jotting down the title RHINOCERVS, Dürer vouches for it by affixing
his own trademark initials, a letter D squeezed between the legs of a capital
A, which seems particularly oversized even in comparison with his normally
rather self-assertive signing habit. This is an authentic rhinoceros – the
claim is stated and warranted by a man no less than Alfred Dürer himself. It is
as if the letter D stood between the doorjambs formed by the A, or stepped
forth from that doorway to greet us. Indeed, that letter A might be taken to
stand for the Hungarian village of Ajtós (literally “the place with doors”)
from where his father hailed, changing his name to Tür (“door” in
German), which in pronunciation turned into Dür, and eventually into Dürer.
That the initials form a pictogram becomes obvious upon the first glance at the
Dürers’ family crest, which features a door in a more readily recognizable
form. Seen in this light, the paraphrase of the formula in words perhaps no
longer seems so pretentious: I the undersigned Albrecht Dürer open a door for
you so that you may step into the world I have drawn for you. Of course, five
hundred years on the habits of viewing a picture have inevitably changed. The
technique of relief printing, xylography, and the attendant crisp,
contrast-driven visual language, which were regarded as a novelty, even
breathtakingly modern at the time, have since gone out of fashion. There is a
deep chronological chasm from which we view the rhinoceros, a miraculous beast
then recently discovered in the New World, as a paleontological relic of a
species on the brink of extinction today. Yet if we dwell on the image, taking
the time to acquaint ourselves with the details of its history and destiny, all
of a sudden we will recognize the symbolic in it. Nor is it necessary to
explain the subtle sense of self-irony that emerges if we take ourselves too
seriously as we subject the rhino image to profound scholarly scrutiny. For
this cumbersome, heavy-set, slow-to-move, near-extinct creature is indeed the
mirror image of the woodcut, of graphic design, of the hand-crafted
illumination – in a word, our dying trade. He is there lurking in the
beautifully ham-fisted fiascos of manual work, in the derailed pencil lines, in
the marks left by the slip of the knife, in the broken contours, in the
inadvertent smudges and spills of paint. I have heard rumors about tiny fits
and starts, bursts of random noise built into the latest computer programs in
an attempt to make them seem more live and natural, a bit more rhinocerean
if you will. Perhaps the artist’s initials directly underneath the title are
part of the tongue-in-cheek self-irony. Just read the two together: RHINOCERUS
– AD could mean “Albrecht Dürer, the rhinoceros.” Having completed his self-portrait
in the wistful Melencolia, the artist moved to create a playful and
mocking double for himself, as if to say, “This is me, too, please recognize
me!” First seen as boastful, ostentatious and haughty, the initials now quietly
turn in upon themselves as the artist laughingly lays bare his own rhinoceroid
nature for all of us to laugh at, which he apparently does not mind at all. In
the year of the Rhinoceros, Dürer was a mature man whose likeness to his
idealized self-portraits in youth had faded, and who had begun to look
increasingly like his portrait cut during his last year on earth by his
disciple and colleague Erhard Schön. It shows the profile of a burly
heavyweight wrestler with the pigheaded beady gaze of a rhinoceros, and a
massive nose better described as a rhinome. Juxtaposing this late portrait
to the Rhinoceros print seems to corroborate the belief professed by all masters
of dogs that the relationship between man and his pet will sooner or later
manifest itself in physical resemblance. Who knows how many, if any, were tuned
in to Dürer’s intent to discover any single aspect of the artist’s encrypted
self-reflexive attitude in the Rhinoceros? Whatever the truth, the work
itself attained fame quickly.
“Shall the rhinoceros be
willing to serve thee, or will he stay at thy crib? Canst thou bind
the rhinoceros with thy thong to plough, or will he break the clods of the
valleys after thee? Wilt thou have confidence in his great strength, and leave
thy labours to him? Wilt thou trust him that he will render thee the seed, and
gather it into thy barnfloor?” I purposefully selected this quote from Job
39:9-12 in the translation of the Douay-Rheims
1899 American Edition. When Luther, in his 1534 German translation of the Old
Testament, writes Einhorn, it is unlikely that he had in mind the
ethereal unicorn, often depicted in the company of angels in late medieval
paintings. It is far more plausible that he refers to the single-horned rhino
or Nashorn. It is more or less apparent from the context that the
creature named reym in the Hebrew original possesses a horn or horns of
some sort and that it must be a large, powerful and fierce animal. Accordingly,
the diverse translations including the Hungarian versions of the Bible (Károli,
Káldi, the Hungarian Bible Society, the St. Stephen Society) render the Hebrew
variously as bull, ox, buffalo, wild cattle, or bison. I am quite sure that
Luther’s ingenious choice of the word rhinoceros was inspired by the famous
woodcut by Dürer; the two had known each other since 1518. Indeed, Luther’s
translation hits a bull’s eye, since the rhinoceros is more apt than anything
else as a vehicle for the message, which rhetorically questions the absurd idea
that any wild and independent creature of God could serve man as some sort of
domesticated day laborer. However, Luther would not have been able to sleep
well after committing this word to paper in his German translation had his
compatriots had no idea what beast he was talking about. While we have no
evidence that anybody in Germany had heard of the animal before 1515, two
decades later everyone seemed to be perfectly familiar with the beast – and
they were familiar with it because they had all seen Dürer’s image of it. The
prints sold at markets everywhere had a generally beneficial influence on the
democratization of art, but Dürer’s Rhinoceros surpassed them all in its
sheer influence. The artist himself dealt in various woodcuts, buying, selling,
trading and swapping whatever he could lay his hands on (in those days, print
runs were not really limited until the elmwood block gave in under the load).
In this specific case, not only did prints of the rhinoceros not run out, but their
number started to rise exponentially after a veritable industry of making
copies of Dürer’s work had sprung up. It was cut over and over again to be
inserted in various books, compendia, and encyclopediae. By the middle of the
16th century, the only people who had not seen a rhino were those
who had no eyes to see one.
The
emerging art market was normally divided along well-defined lines, with
peasants buying wood prints and the bourgeoisie hording copper engravings,
while collecting paintings remained the privilege of the aristocracy. Our
rhinoceros, however, permeated social boundaries and even national borders. A
case in point was Kronborg, Hamlet’s castle, with its huge, resplendent
tapestry, epitomizing the loftiest genre fit only for kings and queens. It was
woven around 1550 in Flanders, from where it traveled to Denmark, probably on
commission from our own Dowager Queen Mary of Hungary, widowed by Louis II who had
perished in the Battle of Mohács. The tapestry features a rhinoceros with the
second ancillary horn clearly visible, which proves beyond the shadow of a
doubt that its source was Dürer’s armored beast. “Armed rhinoceros” – I
am now quoting Macbeth exhorting Banquo’s ghost to appear in the form of the
beast, for even that would be less terrifying for him than the intangible
apparition haunting him. Shakespeare penned his tragedy around 1606, when no
rhinoceros had ever set foot on the isle of Albion, but he could be sure that
his audience in London would readily envision the armored beast – owing to
Dürer’s widely circulated print. Although in Julius Caesar he mentions a
unicorn, he probably had the rhinoceros in mind (and this is indeed how the
word was translated into Hungarian by Vörösmarty, the great 19th-century
poet).
Meanwhile,
our perissodactyl’s career took a political turn when Alessandro de’Medici, the
rough-faced, violent dictator of Florence decided, perhaps in a fit of
self-irony, to make a personal emblem of Dürer’s armor-plated, militant
rhinoceros with that add-on dorsal horn, supplemented by the banner inscription
“I shall not return without victory” (1536). A little later, in 1549, Henry II,
the son of Francis I of France was greeted upon his march into Paris with the
gift of an enormous rhinoceros statue (perhaps partly in tribue to his father’s
tryst with a rhino, as I will explain shortly). The beast, sculpted by Jean
Goujon – and another Dürer replica, needless to say – stood in front of
Saint-Sépulcre church and supported an Egyptian obelisk on its back. In neither
case did the rhino turn out to be a good omen: Both rulers died a violent death.
In
vain would we prefer to behold beauty in our rhinoceros, or at least to
appreciate its positive aspects, for the innocent beast somehow invariably
ended up on the dark side as a symbol of terror. As early as in 1593, Cesare
Ripa in his Iconology recommended a blind woman with the head of a
rhinoceros as the most fitting allegory to represent fury. The French
revolutionaries saw it as the emblem of absolutism; the rhinoceros Louis XVI
kept at his palace in Versailles met the fate of his master shortly after he
was executed. Hitler renamed his gigantic tank destroyer Nashorn because
he thought its original name of Hornisse (hornet) was not menacing
enough. The rhinoceros became Ionesco’s animal of choice to debunk the totalitarian
régimes of the 20th century in his eponymous play, written in 1959.
As I am typing these notes I get this email from K.A., who is unaware of the
subject preoccupying me at the moment, asking for permission to use one of my
own rhino drawings on the cover of his new book on political systems.
So
it seems we are stuck with politics if we wish to carry the vita of our rhino
to its logical and sad conclusion. Bear with me, for the end is nigh. In order
to demonstrate his loyalty to Pope Leo X (born de’Medici), Portugal Manuel I of
Portugal, often referred to by historians as Manuel the Fortunate (nota bene,
the epithet Unfortunate would be more apt in light of the passage that
follows), sent the rhinoceros off to Rome along with various exotica including
Indian slaves, Persian horses, parrots, leopards, and bong pipes. Manuel had
reason enough to lavish all these gifts on Leo, for the Pope had the ultimate
say in the size of colonies Portugal was allowed to acquire. Although Pope
Alexander VI in 1494 had sanctioned the Treaty of Tordesillas which divided the
world between Spain and Portugal, the two major colonizing powers, during the
twenty years that followed new discoveries changed the face of the Earth to
such an extent that it became pressing to renegotiate the deal. Manuel knew
well that the Pope would be amenable to corruption by the gift of the rhino,
because he had been so delighted by Hanno, the white elephant sent to him upon
his inauguration, that he started bouncing up and down in joy (and apparently oblivious
to the audacity of taunting an obese, elephantine pontiff with a real elephant).
Manuel also knew that he had to act fast lest the foxy Spanish preempt him by bribing
his holiness with an even more curious creature. So pressed by circumstance,
Manuel did not wait until spring and launched the invaluable cargo in January,
when the sea was always unpredictable. The ship moored at the island of If off Marseilles
harbor on January 24th, and the rhino was led ashore to be marveled
at by Francis I of France and his entourage, who had interrupted an official
program and made the detour just to see the beast. Then the ship set off for
Rome via Porto Venere, where it met its well-known fate. The claim of
zoological textbooks about rhinos being good swimmers could not be
substantiated or refuted as the case may be, owing to the shackles fastened to
the rhino’s fore legs (as seen in the cuts by Burgkmair and Penni), which did
not leave the poor soul the smidgen of a chance to escape. The curious crowd
that had gathered in the harbor of the Eternal City had to make do with
rhino-motif trinkets hawked by market peddlers and prints from local shops.
They compensated themselves by embellishing and relaying the horror stories
circulating around the city about the Beast being invisible to all except to genuinely
holy men and truly innocent virgins, who alone earned the privilege of laying
eyes on him by their virtue. For our part, let us content ourselves with the
familiar wisdom that passing on a gift brings misfortune. If my reckoning is
correct, our rhino changed hands no fewer than four times, along the Muzaffar
II – Diego de Beja – Afonso de Albuquerque – Manuel I chain, before his
delivery to his hopeful fifth master, Leo X, was foiled by the shipwreck. As
far as we know, none of them bothered to give it a name, thinking that the honor
of baptizing the beast would devolve to the next rightful owner. The viceroy considered
the task of naming the animal to be a royal one, while the king reasoned that
no one lesser than the Pope should be entitled to the privilege. We know subsequent
rhinos of fame by name (Abada and Clara come to mind), but the one who was seen
and owned by so many dignitaries was and remains linked to the name of a man
who never set eyes on him. We call him Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros.
Whatever
is left of the animal’s mortal coil is probably still lying at the bottom of
the sea, ducked by the occasional school of fish. Others conjecture that the
carcass of the drowned rhinoceros was found, stuffed with straw, and sent to
the Pope in this shape, and that it has been collecting dust in an obscure
store-room of the Vatican’s fine art workshop. If this is true, let us hope
that the times have not completely consigned to oblivion the old custom among
art students there, particularly among woodblock cutting apprentices, of rising
upon their toes on a three-legged stool so they can grab the humongous horn of
the beast, the better to whisper the arcane text of their vocational oath in
its large, shaggy ear.
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