Early depictions of the first Lisbon rhinoceros in the 16th century

Abstract

The first post-Roman rhinoceros to be seen alive in Europe reached the harbour of Lisbon, Portugal on 20 May 1515. After a fight with an elephant staged on 3 June 1515, King Dom Manuel I ‘the Fortunate’ decided to gift the rhino to Pope Leo X in Rome. The animal drowned when the vessel was shipwrecked in a storm off La Spezia in northern Italy at the end of January 1516. Information and a sketch reached the German city of Nuremberg, where Albrecht Dürer proceeded to make a drawing with text dated 1515, followed by a woodcut of the Lisbon Rhinoceros. Dürer’s works show a characteristic twisted horn in the shoulder region, found in all later copies, which became the standard representation of the rhinoceros from 1545 in books and artworks. During the first part of the 16th century, until about 1560, there were at least 16 works showing a rhinoceros without this Dürer-hornlet. These would have been sketches of the living animal during its short life in Europe, or possibly been derived from such portrayals. Five such works have remained largely unknown, and are here described, discussed and illustrated. First, there is a set of similar engravings found in three separate Cartinhas (booklets) produced in Portugal between 1534-1544 by the printer Germão Galharde, where the animal is uniquely named “Rhinocerom”, here noticed in zoological context for the first time. Second, two similar figures of a rhinoceros on the cover of a pamphlet by the Italian author Giovanni Giacomo Penni and in the background of a large painting by Francesco Granacci of 1515-1516 might both be based on a coloured unsigned sketch found in a volume of manuscripts in the Library of the Vatican (Vat. lat. 2847). Third, the Historia Senensium by Sigismondo Tizio contains a sketch of a rhinoceros in shackles in an entry for 1515. Fourth, a rhinoceros is found among marginal drawings and manuscript annotations added to a volume of Pliny’s Natural History. Finally, a book on Quadrupeds published by Michael Herr in 1546 has an independent illustration of a rhinoceros without a hornlet on the shoulders, copied in books by Hubert de L'Espine of 1558 and Barthélemy Aneau of 1559. All examples are illustrated for future comparison.