Rhinoceros - Historical Representations

Historical Representations

Albrecht Dürer created a famous woodcut of a rhinoceros in 1515, based on a written description and brief sketch by an unknown artist of an Indian rhinoceros that had arrived in Lisbon earlier that year. Dürer never saw the animal itself and, as a result, Dürer's Rhinoceros is a somewhat inaccurate depiction.

There are legends about rhinoceros stamping out fire in Malaysia, India, and Burma. The mythical rhinoceros has a special name in Malay, badak api, where badak means rhinoceros and api means fire. The animal would come when a fire is lit in the forest and stamp it out. There are no recent confirmations of this phenomenon. However, this legend has been reinforced by the film The Gods Must Be Crazy, where an African rhinoceros is shown to be putting out two campfires.

Dürer's Rhinoceros, in a woodcut from 1515 A rhinoceros depicted on a Roman mosaic in Villa Romana del Casale, an archeological site near Piazza Armerina in Sicily, Italy Media related to Rhinoceroses in art at Wikimedia Commons