A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [189]
The story of how the rhino came to Europe tells us that the Portuguese were not just trading with India but were trying to establish permanent bases there – this is the very beginning of the European land presence in Asia. They succeeded largely thanks to Alfonso d’Albuquerque, the first governor and effective founder of the Portuguese empire in India, and the man who brought us the rhino. In 1514 Albuquerque approached the sultan of Gujarat to negotiate the use of an island, accompanying his embassy with lavish presents. The sultan responded with gifts in return – including a live rhinoceros. Albuquerque seems to have been somewhat flummoxed by this living gift, so he took advantage of a passing Portuguese flotilla and sent the beast to Lisbon as a special present to the king. Getting a rhino weighing between one and a half and two tons on to a sixteenth-century ship must have been quite a task.
A little Italian poem celebrates the voyage that astonished all of Europe:
I am the rhinoceros brought hither from dusky India,
From the vestibule of light and the gateway of the day.
I boarded the fleet bound for the west, its bold sails undaunted,
Daring new lands, to see a different sun.
The rhino began its journey from India in early January 1515. He was accompanied by his Indian keeper, Osem, and vast quantities of rice – an odd choice of diet for a rhino but much less bulky than his usual fodder. We don’t know how the rhino liked his food, but he seems to have thrived, and after a sea journey of 120 days, with only three stops in port – at Mozambique, St Helena and the Azores – he arrived in Lisbon on 20 May. Crowds flocked in amazement to watch.
The rhino arrived in a Europe that was obsessed not only with a possible future that lay beyond its shores, but also with recovering its own deep past at home. Ancient Roman buildings and statues were being excavated with huge excitement in Italy, archaeological work that was uncovering the reality of the Classical world. The appearance of the rhinoceros – this exotic creature from the East – was, for educated Europeans, another piece of antiquity recovered. The Roman author Pliny had described such a beast, and they had starred in Roman amphitheatres, but none had been seen in Europe for more than a thousand years. It was an exhilarating retrieval of Classical antiquity – a kind of living zoological Renaissance with the added allure of exotic Eastern wealth. It’s not surprising that Dürer responded so strongly. The historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto explains:
The rhinoceros was so important because people looked at him and saw the embodiment of one of the most famous texts in the Classical world, Pliny’s Natural History, which devotes a very short chapter to the rhinoceros. And when people saw it they said, ‘You know, Pliny was right! This creature really exists! Here we’ve got evidence of the reliability of these texts from antiquity …’ That’s why Dürer drew him, that’s why engravings of him were sought after all over Europe.
The Portuguese king decided to send the rhino on as a present to the Pope, whose support he needed in establishing his claims to empire in the East. He knew that the Pope and all Rome would be enthralled by the creature. But the poor beast never made it to Italy. The ship carrying it was hit by a storm off La Spezia and sank with all hands. Although rhinos are competent swimmers, since it was chained to the deck it also drowned.
But the rhino lived on by reputation, and even while it was alive, accounts, poems and sketches of the exotic creature spread across Europe. One sketch reached Dürer, in Nuremberg; of course, Dürer had never seen a rhinoceros. We have no idea how much detail this sketch contained, but the finished print that Dürer derived from it clearly owes a great deal to the artist’s imagination. At first