Quick Demonstration of Style and Perception Psychology
* * *
Dürer. 1515, woodcut.
Pope Leo X never even got to see his present. The ship carrying Leo’s soon to be pet rhinoceros (courtesy of Portugal’s Manuel I) sank off the coast of Liguria. The quasi-aquatic beast in its hold, unable to escape his shackles, sank with it.
In 16th century Europe, the rhinoceros was an almost legendary creature. Pliny’s ancient Roman account of the rhinoceros – the source of the small caption above the animal on the block – described it as a fierce creature, a mortal enemy of the elephant. And so, when Albrecht Dürer set about to craft a woodcut after a sketch made of the ill-fated animal during its brief layover in Lisbon, what we now see as mythological embellishments must have felt to Dürer like corrections. He interpreted the saggy armor-like folds of rhinoceros skin as actual armor and adorned the scaly mail (particularly the dragon-like legs) with an additional horn protruding from the spine.
For the next 250 years, Dürer’s rhinoceros was taken to be an anatomically accurate representation of the animal. It was used as a source for nature textbooks, emblazoned on cathedral doors and royal banners. The image of the rhinoceros was only updated after Clara the Rhinoceros’s European tour in the 1740s.
Oudry. 1750, drawing. Image flipped.
Heath. 1789, engraving.
James Bruce, in his Travels to the Source of the Nile (1790), noted Dürer’s errors and made an insightful comment on their endurance.
The animal represented in this drawing is a native of Terkin, near Ras el Feel… and this is the first drawing of the rhinoceros with a double horn that has ever yet been presented to the public. The first figure of the Asiatic rhinoceros, the species having but one horn, was painted by Albert Dürer, from the life… It was wonderfully ill-executed in all its parts, and was the origin of all the monstrous forms under which that animal has been painted, ever since… Several modern philosophers have made amends for this in our days; Mr. Parsons, Mr. Edwards, and the Count de Bouffon, have given good figures of it from life; they have indeed some faults, owing chiefly to preconceived prejudices and inattention… This…is the first that has been published with two horns, it is designed from the life, and is an African.’ Italics mine.
Take off those blinders of prejudice and preconception, says Bruce! The days of Dürer’s distortions are over: this is what a rhinoceros looks like.
Almost. No one knows what kind of rhinoceros the artist saw, but if it looked anything like the ones that now populate that region, he might want to go back to the proverbial drawing board.
Schulthess. 1959, photograph.
Maybe the artist actually witnessed an Indian variety, the Great One-Horned rhinoceros that Bruce claims to have been Dürer’s subject. The photograph does seem to more closely resemble the 18th century representations, apparent hybrids of one species’ skin and another species’ horns. Or is there another force at play?
Darren Swim. 2007, photograph.
In fact, the animal depicted by Heath and Oudry resembles no known rhinoceros. This is no insult to their talent.
When a child attempts to draw a tree, he relies on culturally codified symbols, also known signifiers: a vertical line signifies a trunk and a swirl atop signifies the leaves. Colors (brown trunk, green leaves) make these signifiers easier for others to identify. What this series of rhinoceros sketches demonstrates is how deeply our preconceptions – despite our talent, despite our recognition of their baselessness – affect our perceptions and, thus, our ability to represent things ‘accurately.’
The rhinoceros signifiers instilled by Dürer’s drawing were so ubiquitous and deep-seated that, even when presented with (we assume) the ‘real thing’, the artist could not help but reproduce them. Otherwise, the drawing would have defied our expectations of the animal and the representation would have seemed incorrect. That tendency of perception might explain why Dürer’s rhinoceros remained the standard for so long, a sort of Platonic form in which his successors, preferring, intentionally or not, the immaterial to the immediate, felt compelled to share.
Even Dalí couldn’t resist.
Salvador Dalí. Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas, 1956. Puerto Banús, Spain.
***
I stole the seed and some of the images for this post from Art and Illusion by Ernst Gombrich and filled in the rest with various resources, particularly the holy Wikipedia. Also forgive the abundance of ‘enclosed’ terms. I try to avoid those in actual papers, but some ideas, unpacked, are too complex for this format.
