Albrecht Dürer never saw the animal he made famous. In May 1515 a live Indian rhinoceros arrived in Lisbon, a gift from the Sultan of Gujarat to King Manuel I of Portugal. It was the first rhinoceros seen in Europe for more than a thousand years, and news of it spread quickly. A sketch and a written description reached Dürer in Nuremberg, and within weeks he had cut the design in wood.
The result is a rhinoceros as a knight in armor. The skin is divided into plates fastened with rivets, the legs are covered in scales, and a small twisted horn grows from the shoulders, which no real rhinoceros has. The German text above it tells the story of the animal and its arrival in Lisbon. The monogram AD and the date 1515 sit in the corner.
The animal's fate was sad. King Manuel sent it as a present to Pope Leo X, and the ship wrecked on the way in early 1516. The rhinoceros drowned. Dürer's picture survived it by centuries, and it was copied in natural history books across Europe for roughly two hundred years, errors included.
This impression is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It shows that a woodcut made from a secondhand description could be more influential than a drawing from life.
Dürer's The Rhinoceros appears on our: