The Rhinoceros

In 1515 Albrecht Durer drew and cut a woodcut of an animal he never saw, working from a written description and a rough sketch that had traveled from Lisbon to Nuremberg describing an Indian rhinoceros sent as a diplomatic gift to the Portuguese crown. The print is wrong in specific, documented ways - an extra twisted horn on the shoulder, hide rendered as riveted armor plate - and it became the standard European image of a rhinoceros for two centuries anyway, reprinted from Durer's own woodblock long after his death.

This sheet is one of those later reprints: the sixth of eight editions pulled from the block, printed roughly a century after Durer cut it by the Hague publisher Hendrick Hondius the Elder, with the original German text replaced by Dutch. The new text corrects an error present on every earlier edition, the wrong arrival year, and in the same breath commits a new one, telling readers Durer drew the animal from life. He did not. That single sheet, now in the Rijksmuseum, carries the whole problem this print poses in miniature: a documented factual correction sitting next to a documented new fabrication, both printed from a block that was, by then, a hundred years into a working life that would run for at least a century more.

What the object is

The print shows a rhinoceros in profile, facing right, rendered in the fine continuous black line of a woodcut rather than the softer tonal range of an engraving. Its hide is drawn as a series of hard, overlapping plates, riveted at the seams like armor, with a gorget at the throat and a breastplate across the chest. Scaled, saw-toothed legs support it, and a small, twisted second horn juts from its shoulder, above and behind the true nasal horn. None of that is how an actual Indian rhinoceros looks. Above the image, on the sheet examined here, five lines of Dutch letterpress text give the animal's arrival date, its origin, and a claim about how the image was made.

The sheet itself measures 212 by 299 millimeters, close to the dimensions recorded for the print's other surviving editions across institutions, though not identical to any of them; sheets were trimmed differently by different owners over four centuries, and small variations in recorded measurement are themselves part of the print's evidentiary record rather than noise to be smoothed away.

Why a rhinoceros was in Lisbon at all

The animal existed in Europe because of a failed piece of Portuguese imperial diplomacy. In 1514 Afonso de Albuquerque, governor of Portuguese India, sent ambassadors to Sultan Muzaffar Shah II, ruler of Gujarat and known in Portuguese sources as the Sultan of Cambay, seeking permission to build a fort at Diu on the Gujarati coast. The request was refused. In the exchange of gifts that accompanied the failed negotiation, the Sultan gave Albuquerque an Indian rhinoceros, known locally as ganda.

The animal sailed from Goa in January 1515 aboard the Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, a voyage of some four months around the Cape of Good Hope, with stops at Mozambique, Saint Helena, and the Azores, arriving in Lisbon on 20 May 1515. King Manuel I kept it at his menagerie at the Ribeira Palace, where, according to the accounts that survive, he staged a fight between the rhinoceros and a young elephant to test Pliny the Elder's ancient claim that the two species were natural enemies; the elephant fled before contact.

The gift to the Pope, and the shipwreck

Manuel decided to send the rhinoceros on to Pope Leo X, partly, on the account given in the sources consulted, to reinforce the papal grants that gave Portugal exclusive claim to the territories it was opening in the East. Fitted with a collar of green velvet decorated with flowers, the animal was put aboard a ship bound for Rome in December 1515. The vessel wrecked in a storm off the Ligurian coast near Porto Venere, close to La Spezia and not far from Genoa. Chained on deck, the rhinoceros could not swim free and drowned.

Its carcass was recovered near Villefranche-sur-Mer and the hide was sent back to Lisbon to be prepared as a taxidermy mount. Some accounts report that the stuffed skin eventually reached Rome by February 1516; what became of it after that is not established in the sources consulted, which offer only two competing possibilities: that the mount passed into Medici hands and was later moved to Florence, or that it was lost in the Sack of Rome in 1527. This record does not resolve that question and lists it as open below.

How the report reached Durer

Durer never saw a living rhinoceros; he was in Nuremberg the entire time the animal was alive in Europe. What reached him was paper. Valentim Fernandes, an ethnic German printer from Moravia who had lived and worked in Lisbon since 1495, saw the rhinoceros shortly after it arrived and wrote an account of it in a letter sent to correspondents in Nuremberg in June 1515. The original German text of that letter has not survived; only an Italian transcript, held today at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, is known.

A second letter, of unknown authorship, was sent from Lisbon to Nuremberg at around the same time enclosing a sketch of the animal by an unnamed artist. It was this second letter and its sketch, rather than Fernandes's account directly, that Durer is recorded as having seen and used; he had existing contacts among the Portuguese merchant community trading through Antwerp, which is the likeliest channel by which both documents crossed from Lisbon. From the sketch Durer made two pen-and-ink drawings. One of them, now in the British Museum, survives with an inscription giving the animal's arrival date as 1513 - two years wrong. The same wrong date was carried onto the finished woodcut. Durer worked from a written account and a secondhand drawing, and he reproduced an error present in his source material rather than correcting it himself; there is no reason to read the mistake as his own invention.

The armor, the extra horn, and what they might mean

The print's inaccuracies are specific enough to argue about, and scholars have argued about them without reaching a settled answer. The plated, riveted hide is the most visible departure from the real animal. One proposal, floated by the historian Glynis Ridley, is that Durer was depicting armor genuinely made for the Lisbon rhinoceros ahead of its staged fight with Manuel's elephant; the standard scholarly account of the episode, Silvio Bedini's The Pope's Elephant, does not mention any such armor, which leaves the idea unconfirmed rather than refuted. A second, more conservative explanation is that the plating is Durer's graphic solution for rendering the heavy, overlapping skin folds that a real Indian rhinoceros does have, translated into the vocabulary of a print medium built from cut lines rather than tonal shading. A third possibility raised in the sources consulted is more mundane: the animal may have developed a skin condition after four months of close confinement aboard ship, and Durer's informants may have been describing diseased skin rather than natural hide.

The small extra horn on the shoulder has no comparably developed rival explanations in the material reviewed here; it appears to be either an artifact of a poor original sketch or an invention filling a gap in a written description that did not specify where the animal's single horn actually sat. What is not in dispute is that the print's German text draws heavily on Pliny the Elder's ancient Natural History for its zoological claims, meaning Durer's image reflects a classical textual authority layered on top of a garbled contemporary report, rather than either source alone.

The block's long working life: eight editions

Durer's own printing, in 1515, was only the first of what is now documented as eight separate editions pulled from the same block over roughly the next century and beyond. Sources consulted here are not able to give firm dates for every edition in the sequence, but the outline is clear: the first edition appeared in 1515, in Durer's lifetime; two further editions followed in the 1540s and two more in the late sixteenth century, all after his death in 1528; a sixth edition, discussed below, was published by Hendrick Hondius the Elder in The Hague around 1618-1622; a seventh edition, a chiaroscuro reissue with an added tone block, was published after 1620 by the Amsterdam printer and cartographer Willem Janszoon, commonly known as Willem Blaeu; and an eighth edition followed the seventh, without further detail available in the sources consulted.

The physical evidence of that century of use is legible on the block's own later impressions. By the time of the seventh, chiaroscuro edition, the border lines had chipped, the block carried numerous woodworm holes, and a pronounced crack had opened running from the animal's tail and hind leg across toward its snout. The scholar Jesse Feiman has argued, in a study of the print's successive states, that these accumulating physical changes did more than degrade the image: each reprinting carried its own audience, its own accompanying text, and in some cases its own claimed authorship, so that the object's meaning changed together with its condition rather than staying fixed while only the paper wore.

This sheet: the sixth edition, Hondius, The Hague

The Rijksmuseum catalogues this specific sheet under the reference Meder 273-6(8): Meder's catalogue number 273 for the composition, state or edition six of the eight known. Its own entry dates the sheet to 1618-1622 and names Hendrick Hondius the Elder, working in The Hague, as publisher. Hondius was primarily known as a mapmaker and print publisher rather than as a Durer specialist, and the edition he issued kept Durer's original block but replaced the earlier German letterpress text with new text in Dutch.

That new text did two things at once. It corrected the wrong arrival date that every earlier edition had carried, changing 1513 to the correct 1515. And it introduced a claim that appears nowhere in Durer's own lifetime editions: that Durer had drawn the rhinoceros from life. He had not; he was in Nuremberg throughout, working from a secondhand sketch and a written account, as set out above. A century after the print was first made, its own publisher was correcting one documented error while manufacturing a new one, on the same sheet, in the same short block of text. That is the single most concrete, sheet-specific fact this record can establish about the object in front of it, and it is the reason this record exists in the form it does rather than as a generic account of Durer's rhinoceros image.

The preparatory drawing

Durer's own working drawing for the print survives. It is a pen-and-ink study, in the British Museum, showing the rhinoceros in profile with an inscription that gives the same wrong arrival date, 1513, later carried onto the printed block. The sheet entered the British Museum as part of the Sloane collection: the physician and collector Sir Hans Sloane's bequest, which formed the museum's founding collection when it was established in 1753. The drawing is therefore documented in a public collection more than two and a half centuries before the Rijksmuseum sheet examined in this record was catalogued, and it is the closest surviving physical link to Durer's own working process, one step removed from the lost original sketch sent from Lisbon.

A rival image: Hans Burgkmair's more accurate rhinoceros

Durer was not the only German artist to make a rhinoceros print from the 1515 reports. Hans Burgkmair, working in Augsburg at roughly the same time, produced a second woodcut of the animal that omitted Durer's armor plating and extra horn and included the shackles and chain that had restrained the real animal. On the available evidence, Burgkmair's image is the more accurate of the two. It is also, commercially and historically, the loser: only a single impression of Burgkmair's print is known to survive, held by the Albertina in Vienna, while Durer's version was reprinted across eight editions over more than a century and became the image nearly all of Europe actually saw. Accuracy did not determine which picture won; distribution did.

Two centuries as the only rhinoceros Europe knew

Durer's image did not just circulate widely in its own right; it was copied directly into the emerging natural history literature as though it were observational fact. Princeton's own impression of the print, a different sheet from the one discussed in this record, is catalogued with the note that the image was reproduced in Johann Jonston's Historiae Naturalis, a major illustrated natural history published in 1657, and that it remained one of the standard European depictions of the animal for a further century after that.

The correction, when it came, is itself documented and datable. In 1743 the physician James Parsons read a paper before the Royal Society, published as A Letter to Martin Folkes, Esq., President of the Royal Society, Containing the Natural History of the Rhinoceros, drawing on a living animal that had by then been exhibited in London. According to the scholar Emma Hanson's 2010 study of the episode, Parsons's plates were a real improvement on Durer's, but even Parsons kept some of Durer's inventions, including the scaled legs, showing how deeply the two-century-old print had lodged itself in the available visual vocabulary for the animal even as its errors were being corrected point by point. Durer's rhinoceros lost its authority only in the second half of the eighteenth century, as more living rhinoceroses were brought to Europe and could simply be looked at directly.

The market for other impressions

The Rijksmuseum sheet has no auction history in the sources consulted; nothing in the museum's own catalogue entry indicates it was ever sold at public auction, and this record does not supply a sale it cannot document. Other impressions of the print, from other editions, have a documented market that shows what state and condition are worth in practice.

The record price for any work by Durer at auction was set on 30 January 2013, when Christie's New York sold a first-edition impression - printed, that is, within Durer's own lifetime, with its original German text intact and in what was reported as excellent condition - for a total of 866,500 US dollars against a pre-sale estimate of 100,000 to 150,000 dollars. The sources consulted report only that combined total and do not separately state the hammer price and the buyer's premium; this record does not attempt to back-calculate one from the other. At the other end of the same market, Swann Galleries in New York sold a fourth-edition impression, carrying a crowned-shield-and-three-fleur-de-lys watermark, at its sale of 31 October 2006 (sale 2091, lot 18) for a hammer price of 10,000 dollars, a buyer's premium of 2,250 dollars, and a total price realized of 12,250 dollars, against an estimate of 15,000 to 20,000 dollars - a rare case in this print's market where hammer and premium are both independently stated and can be given separately, as the rules of this record require. In February 2020, Freeman's in Philadelphia sold a sixth-edition impression, from the same edition as the Rijksmuseum sheet in this record though a physically different sheet, for 81,250 dollars against an estimate of 12,000 to 18,000 dollars; the source consulted states that total figure without separating a hammer price from it. The specialist quoted in that sale's coverage put the 2013 Christie's result as the third-highest price ever realized at auction for any work by Durer, in any medium, and noted that some 26 separate auction appearances of Rhinoceros impressions had been recorded since 1990 alone - a figure that almost certainly counts some sheets more than once, as impressions are bought, later reoffered, and sold again, but that nonetheless indicates how liquid a market this single print supports compared with most of Durer's other work.

Reproduction, later use, and the image's afterlife

The print's later life runs well past its documented eight editions. The seventh edition's chiaroscuro reissue, printed in olive-green, dark green, and blue-grey from an added tone block after 1620, turned a hundred-year-old scientific illustration into a decorative object in its own right, sold and collected as much for its color as for its content; impressions survive at the British Museum and elsewhere. Salvador Dali, who had a reproduction of Durer's rhinoceros hanging in his childhood home, returned to the image repeatedly in his own work in the twentieth century, an afterlife entirely disconnected from the print's original claim to zoological accuracy. The image's staying power is itself now a documented subject of scholarship rather than an incidental fact: Jesse Feiman's account of the print's changing states treats the object's popularity, rather than its correctness, as the thing that needs to be explained.