Part 1 – The Misplaced Rhino Horn

From 1515 til the late 1930s, Dürer's rhinoceros woodcut image appeared in school textbooks throughout Germany. The level of detail Durer imparted to the rhino lulls one into thinking Durer knew what he was doing and the rhino was legit.  However, upon close inspection, you can see a small twisted fictitious horn on its back. Look more closely, and you notice Durer’s depiction shows the animal with hard plates that cover its body like sheets of spotted turtle shells, ruffled fabric scarf around its throat, a full breast plate of chest armor, and scaly legs. Exactly what kind of beast is this? (For architects this is common Revit drawing experience. You are led to believe a Revit drawing is legit because of the polished line work and level of detail only to find out during construction it’s all a bunch of unbuildable nonsense. And you start thinking, what kind of beast is this?)

For an artist who could draw grass, rabbits, and rabbits to amazing detail, it didn’t make sense. With all of those aforementioned non-rhino works display prodigious observation powers. How could Durer draw plants so accurately, then resort to fictionalized fantasy for a rhino?




The answer… Duhrer never did see the actual rhino for which he made his famed woodcut, but that didn’t stop him from carving its impression out of wood. Chiseled above his fantasy rhino like the ingredients label of Campbells’s chicken noodle soup can is the Portuguese merchant’s eyewitness text which inspired the woodcut.

“On the first of May in the year 1513 AD, 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 colour 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 rhino had been sent from India to the King Manuel of Portugal as some sort of diplomatic present. It was quite a sensation as a rhino had not stepped foot on European soil since the Roman times. Having read Pliny the Elder’s (79 AD) recounts of the animal’s epic battles with elephants, the curious king with nothing better to do in his spare time, arranged a fight between the rhino and a young elephant from his exotic animal collection, to test the account by Pliny’s testimony that the elephant and the rhinoceros were bitter enemies.

Apparently, the rhinoceros advanced slowly and deliberately towards its foe; the cowardly elephant, unaccustomed to the noisy crowd that turned out to witness the spectacle, fled the field in panic before a single blow was struck.

I hypothesized Durer must’ve drawn from his imagination before and predicted Durer didn’t just draw horns on rhino’s back without practice. He must have had lots of experience. Lo and behold, like all the artists of his time, Durer devoted a fair amount of his time to depicting imaginary scenes by illustrating bible passages. Mastering drawing what could be seen and what could be imagined meant Durer could easily pivot between imagination and reality. Four years before the misplaced rhino horn, Durer breathed life into mythical beasts from the Book of Revelation. 

These Second Coming Apocalyptic Campbell soup can ingredients are much more exciting:

“And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast” (Revelation 13:1-3).”



After studying the rhino and the second apocalypse scenes rather closely I began thinking how it’s quite common for artists, architects, comedians to use texts as springboards to creation. In fact, 400 years later, Richard Pryor riffed on the same Apocalyptic passage as a sermon to joke about racism in America and Lou Kahn would delve deeper into biblical texts in his quest to design his unbuilt Hurva Temple design.