Animals Strike Curious Poses

by Elena Passarello

  A woodcut print could hit the Nuremberg market in less than a fortnight. After the artist made his master sketch, a Formschneider laid it over a thin block of pearwood. He’d gouge away all the blank space of the sketch by cutting against the wood grain with the most precise of blades, which caused the image to spring from the block in relief. After the block was rolled in ink and set to a heavy press, Dürer’s Rhinocerus body would appear on a fresh page, shiny and black.

  Once the paper was clipped on a line to dry, that same block could be immediately re-inked, and it was. At least four thousand times in Dürer’s life, the workshop made a new Rhinocerus, and then again and again, long past his death in 1528. And further still into the 1600s, when the block changed hands and traveled to Holland. And again and again—as the border cracked, as worms ate away at the frame and at the scales of the legs, until the broken block could only manage a printing in green chiaroscuro.

  Where only one Ganda-body was seen from ancient Rome to the Renaissance, thousands upon thousands of Dürer rhinos—extra horns and all—papered the continent in less than a century. And unlike the imagined RHINOCERON bodies of the myths or the bestiaries, which warped with every retelling, Dürer’s Rhinocerus was legion and exact, its visible traits verbatim in every library and curiosity cabinet. It is difficult now to understand what that kind of exponential repetition, after so much nothing, did to a culture. Luckily, we’ve been left four centuries of visual evidence.

  Natural histories and books of beasts in England, Belgium, and France began faithfully repeating the body as Dürer imagined it. Within a few decades, the Germans had nicknamed it Panzernashorn: a horn-and-armor. Travel books drew it—the plates, the sulk, the cow’s lip—into places Ganda would never be seen, like China and the Cape of Good Hope. A Medici emblazoned the Dürer rhino on his crest, and France’s Henry II ordered a wood totem of Rhinocerus trampling a lion for his royal parade. In 1580, a Habsburg archduke commissioned a portrait of a bride riding a Rhinocerus to her wedding. Italian sculptors chiseled its scowl into a Florentine grotto and a Sicilian fountain.

  In the Flemish lowlands, ateliers hid the Dürer body in the glorious leaves of their tapestries—boarding the Ark or grimacing alongside a warbling Orpheus. The bodies always struck the same pose as that of the print: facing the same direction, the head down and the face stoic, a little bored. The same year Vermeer painted his shimmering, perfect Lacemaker, Francis Barlow drew the Rhinocerus stabbing an elephant in the gut, just as Pliny intended. Also that year, a man in Persia sketched a body that much more closely resembled Ganda’s, but no one in Europe noticed.

  Parisian weavers stitched two Rhinocerus yoked at the shoulder-horns, glumly pulling a battle chariot. Eighty years after that, the same looms wove a scene of the hornletted body watching a cheetah gnaw at a zebra’s neck. That gory scene was reproduced again and again for five decades, until the weaving cartoons dissolved. And on and on, with nothing in the real world to fact-check it, into the eighteenth century, when it was inlaid on card tables and carved into tortoiseshell chessboards and onyx cameos. These reproductions were never Dürer-perfect—proportions changed, as did color and skill—but the shoulder plates and swirly hornlette and Rhinocerus glower were there. Within two centuries, a hundred thousand specimens of a creature, until nearly anyone could name the body on sight. Dies ist ein wunderbares Panzernashorn!—caged in oil or thread or porcelain, on platters, vases, urns, or goblets too fancy to drink from.

  It took 226 years for Rhinocerus to meet a flesh-and-blood opponent. A docile female body, “tame as a lambe,” she toured Europe throughout the middle of the eighteenth century in a wagon drawn by twenty horses. Crowds from Copenhagen to Naples paid a pittance to walk by her. Some spent more to sit on bleachers and watch her eat hay, and a few “persons of rank” paid to ride on her back. Her charges must have noticed, once they straddled her, the way her flesh heaped over itself, rather than locking into place, and the lack of a horn twirling up from her withers.

  No Ganda-bodied beast had traveled this much of the continent, or managed to stay alive on it for so long. She caused a panic. They called her Clara.

  And here, in 1749, is where the 1515 Ganda tale almost repeats. King Louis XV’s “Painter of the Hunt” went to Versailles to sketch something alive and wonderful. But unlike the artist in the Lisbon palace two centuries before him, this man, named Oudry, studied Clara’s body for days, perhaps longer if he followed her to her summer stint in Paris. Oudry made not one, but several images—some in red chalk, others on blue paper—all drawn from the life sat before him.

  One image was sent to a French illustrator, who copied it for a blockbuster encyclopedia. Unlike Dürer, this artist kept his imagination in check, and so it is very much a Clara-body that appears in those thousands of copies of the Histoire Naturelle. The book moved so quickly its publishers were forced to rush-order a second printing within six weeks. This is how Clara’s body—the Ganda body—became one that a child could pick out of a lesson book or draw from memory. Europe saw her not as a myth, but as a creature that might be the next town over, like a sow or a young hare. The year of her death, 242 years after Ganda’s, Linnaeus named her Rhinoceros unicornis. And a new figure began making appearances on the wool rugs and porcelain urns, with its darker skin, its single horn, and its friendlier mouth opened as if to bite leaf from limb. Oudry debuted a fifteen-foot-long oil of her in a salon of the Louvre, naming the painting in the Linneaen fashion—Rhinoceros.

  On the gigantic canvas, Clara shows her right side with her head up and her ears pricked. Her skinfolds have the pink shadow we now know comes natural to her kind. Rather than armed for battle, she looks wet and almost sleek. Her eye is a foreign black bead enclosed in red.

  Despite the keen likeness it strikes, something about the giant portrait falls flat. Though deeply aware of proportion, coloring, and posture, Rhinoceros is static, as if it refuses to open itself. Nothing has morphed; nothing is out of place. Nothing inside the body fights to escape.

  Oudry’s Rhinoceros amplifies a basic limitation: the barrier that a natural animal body presents to human understanding. We humans can only go so far toward another “real” creature. An artist who opts to replicate exactly what a human can see when he stands before an animal can’t help but create this deficit. Something disappears when we bear witness to nature with such gorgeous accuracy. This disappearance isn’t only in painting. Even if Clara arrived in our town, even if we paid the extra shillings to touch her, the space between the flesh of our palms and the other side of her dark body would be vast and absolute.

  For what Nuremberger knows how a young hare sees the world? Who in Landser comprehends what time means to a sow, monstrous or otherwise? And, perhaps even more importantly, what on earth is a European really looking at when his eye falls upon a two-ton beast from Assam? At Versailles, on the Ribeira Palace courtyard, or in any parc sauvage that stands a four-month journey from Ganda’s rightful corner of the planet, what are we really looking at? Her body reminds us of this distance. It reminds us that a specimen like Clara—raised indoors since birth, barreling from country to country in a cage so tight she rubs away her own horn on the walls—might always feel more dreamed-up than a woodcut print on a Nuremberg wall.

  What’s absent from Oudry’s magnificent Rhinoceros painting? Misinformation. Perhaps what made Dürer’s take on the beast so repeatable, so close to us, is that a rhinoceros never stood before him. If the live animal body serves as a boundary, then the missing body allowed Dürer to step into that ancient RHINOCERON and sketch it from the inside out. And under the skin, he placed another animal entirely. It could be that all we really see when we look at a Rhinocerus print (as we now have for a half millennium) is an interior—one that’s made of what we wonder, what we want, and what confuses us. Not the facts of a rhinoceros, but a two-horned body twisted by the facts of human anxiety and awe.

  Dürer’s Rhinocerus depicts the art of living in a modern world that ca
n import gigantic creatures that we’ll never fully understand. Rhinocerus depicts the unnatural reality of being Homo sapiens in a modern world this monstrous, this unknowable, and this full of utter nonsense. The rhinoceros and the idea of a rhinoceros. Dürer’s trick was to harness the loaded moment in which human imagination—destructive, mutative, and tricky—fights the realities of our planet and, real or not, bests them.

  Perhaps this besting is why in 1745, amid all the Clara fever, a sulking, incorrect figure appeared on the Duke of Northumberland’s servingware. Its superfluous hornlette pointed to the top of the plate like a middle finger. A decade later, Dürer’s Rhinocerus walked across the lids of delicate piqué snuffboxes. When rococo animal clocks were all the rage, master craftsman Jean-Joseph de Saint-Germain offered a one-horned Clara clock case, but he also sold a hornletted Rhinocerus model for his more traditional patrons.

  Again and again, into the nineteenth century, even though five more Rhinoceros unicornis had visited the continent by then, “Dürer’s rhino” still hung on Europe’s walls. The British Museum acquired Dürer’s original drawing in 1895, and they still keep it in the museum’s print vault as “the great popular image of European art.” Victorian critic James Bruce called it “wonderfully ill-executed in all its parts” and named Dürer “the origin of all the monstrous forms under which that animal has been painted ever since.”

  The Wonderful and the Monstrous: such are the twists of the Rhinocerus helix. This is what it means to be a creature whose native habitat is human thought.

  This is what makes Nandalal Bose, born in 1882 and called “the Dürer of modern Indian art,” sketch a bold linocut of a Dürer Rhinocerus body for a Bengali storybook.

  This is what led to Bernhard Jager’s inside-out, Dürer-posed lithograph, (interior workings of a Rhinoceros), seventy years later.

  This is what kept a wrong-bodied Panzernashorn in German schoolbooks past the First World War.

  And this is what made Salvador Dalí never forget the Rhinocerus print that hung in his boyhood home. Four decades into adulthood, Dalí announced he was “becoming classical” in order to keep fighting for irrational discoveries. He finagled an invite to the Louvre so he could copy Vermeer’s classic The Lacemaker in a back room. Less than an hour into the session, he looked at his canvas and found he’d instead painted three rhino horns crashing into each other. In the spirals of the horns, Dalí said he discovered “a violent force” atomic to all art. Every European painting was, he said, at its heart, a rhinoceros.

  Now what else could Dalí do but spend the next decade painting rhinoceroses, from the inside out? He adopted Dürer’s Rhinocerus as a personal emblem, just as that Medici did four hundred years earlier, and then he painted his wife Gala as the Virgin, her bones dissolving into white horn-splinters. In 1954, he reimagined a portrait of a nude at a window “auto-sodomized by the [rhino] horns of her own chastity.” The next year, he painted a “paranoiac-critical” study of the Vermeer as an explosion of cylindrical horns. And one year later, he sculpted a Dürer Cosmic Rhinoceros in bronze with spider-legs and a third, gold horn way too long to be just a hornlette. It twists above the center of the rhino’s back and doubles the sculpture’s height.

  And what better pièce de résistance could Dalí have dreamt than the day he burst into the rhino enclosure of the Vincennes zoo with a film crew hot on his tail? There, Dalí set up an easel near the zoo’s resident Ganda-body, named François. In the film crew’s silent footage, the animal paces behind Dalí, who holds his thumb to a copy of Vermeer’s delicate Lacemaker on an easel. After an assistant places a conical hunk of bread—a makeshift horn—to an incorrect spot on Dalí’s scalp, the film cuts to a new location. Dalí has dangled a huge print of The Lacemaker over the mouth of the rhino’s cave: another challenge between a body of nature and a body of art.

  The rhinoceros approaches Vermeer’s painting, seems to sniff it, then bows its head. Low and vulnerable, it backs away in a series of stutter-steps before turning in a circle and walking out of the frame. Then another cut: after picking up a long, thin horn and holding it perpendicular to his body, like a jousting sword, Dalí charges the Lacemaker print himself—runs his body right through it; the natural rhino is nowhere in sight. Though the film is silent, you can almost hear the artist hollering as the giant paper rips to pieces, shouting what he said to his wife the first time he ever held a piece of the beast in his hands: “THIS HORN WILL SAVE MY LIFE!”

  I have seen Sackerson loose twenty times, and have taken him by the chain; but, I warrant you, the women have so cried and shrieked at it, that it passed.

  Slender, The Merry Wives of Windsor

  THE LONDON GARDEN, brackish and packed-in, was hazy with a dozen kinds of flesh. The bulls, cocks, mastiffs, men, and chimpanzees in air so rickety it lowered the roof. So dark, the line ’tween crowd and beasts was marred. There, in that black, Sir Raleigh took his Frenchmen, and other men of duty met their spies. The reason for the famous fireworks? Just so the folks who’d wagered bets could see.

  A rose of flames, pitched high above the crowd, fired smoke into the muck that hung about. It spun and spat red bits around the seats. They’d rigged it to throw pears as it rotated; the fruit-mad crowd would then jump up and chase the rolling pears out to the Bankside streets. Or yardboys, eager in their dirty gloves, would toss hot bread upon the patrons’ laps, which made them clutch and scurry toward the exit. Outside, they’d find some other Sunday sport: an arch’ry butt, a woman, or a play.

  The stews downriver had less fornication. And St. Barthol’mew’s floors less wet with blood. The bloody muzzle or the mastiff’s blood. The blood from fisticuffs up in the stands. The blood of offal, floated down the Thames to Bankside from the abattoirs of town. And by the time the century turned around, it seemed the blood most often spilled was his.

  But do not think that London’s garden crowd imagined him a broken, bashed-in thing. Believe me, this is tricky. I might see the lives of baited bears as nothing but a broken chord of muzzle, chain, and stake. Of blunted teeth, barrages of dog jaws, of living-out a mongrel just to have another thrown upon the slavered flesh. That rink’s the only place that he could run, a hard-won constitutional—fighting dogs and running laps in that dank polygon. That garden, broken even in its flowers—the rosettes they affixéd to his brow were bull’s-eyes for the mastiffs when they jumped. And jump they did, mouths tearing up the flesh that leered at them from each side of the bloom. They bit so hard that London’s citizens grew up thinking a bear’s eyes to be pink.

  Few years of that, he was too blind to fight; the bearwards had to get creative then. Chained center, hunkered, lashed by volunteers until the blood ran rivers down his spine. Sometimes he’d raise his matted arms and gnash about the lash until it broke in half. And once, he stooped low to the lazy knot, untied himself with effort from the stake, and nosed about the rink in backward loops to hear the ladies scream, the bearwards scramble. They dragged him offstage to his pit in cheers.

  For even then, near-lame and sightless, he could still throw nine-stone mastiffs to the stands. Up to the boxes, to the ladies’ laps, bypassing pumpkin hose, straight to the skirts. Like he could sniff a woman’s quivering thigh and hurl the big dog, head o’er tail, right to her. A snort, a twitch to shudder the dog spit, a fling, a lady’s lap a-going oof! And then they’d add another dog, then two … till six or seven mastiffs lined the rink, the sound more deafening since his sight was gone. Goddammit if he wasn’t still around. They could have put his picture on the money.

  Elizabeth, who never said hullo, loved him enough to ban all Thursday sport. Upon the mildest Thursdays, he’d parade out past the playhouse, down to London Bridge. He’d smell the ragmen, actors, punks in stews who yelled for him in ripe cacophony. The bulls, in ribboned horns, all marched behind; the cocks-in-boxes and the dogs behind. The Only Bear That Ever Led the Dogs.

  And even on his nights off, he appeared: in name-checks at the Hope, the Rose, the G
lobe. A dactyl in the mouths of water poets. The only rival Shakespeare called by name. In Jonson. In act five at Dunsinane. At Middle Temple Hall on Candlemas, when Chamber’s fairest boy-in-fake-dugs crooned: Have you not set mine honor at the stake / and baited it with all th’unmuzzled thoughts / that tyrannous heart can think?

  So. It’d be wrong to match that bear with breaking; they built him up. They called him out by name because they read in him a secret code both terrifying and recognizable. They saw it in his stance—up on two legs, the forepaws spread, the ten claws digital. They saw it in his low-slung hips and gut. The way his pupils, round and beady, lived inside a circle of expressive white. And milliseconds prior to the bite, they saw it as he bowed his head and sighed.

  What did they see? They saw themselves, of course.

  A taller man—more leaden and hirsute, with thick skin better suited for a beating, but still their bear. This massive chestnut frame, dwarfed tiny by a darkened ring of foes. A smaller ratio of the rink itself, dwarfed by the river flowing to its north: that lurid, pestilent Thames. Six city plagues—the pox, the “new ague,” the curious “sweats”—all floated past the bear garden in leagues. A river of unprecedented sick. In ’92 things got so royally poxed, the playhouses were forced to shutter up. A quarter of their population down each decade, give or take a hundred score.

  A blighted age can make a garden blind. Each ticketholder turns left, right, behind, and wonders which part of their dark quartet will suffer an unnatural upset next. For when our clans explode up into towns, the back-bite comes from nature, and it smarts. The devil holds back nature by its ears, takes aim, makes wager, then releases it. We toss it off and it regenerates; six natural mouths leap forth before we’re primed.

  Parades of sickness cannot be explained by any learnéd clansmen: physics, priests. The inexplicable can send us toward an unclanned occupation with the self. And selves, like famous bears, are singular. “We are” soon switches places with “I am.” Then clans bewitched by “I ams” become crowds, which are an altogether different thing. He heard those iams in the garden’s roar: