Durer’s rhinoceros

D?rer's Rhinoceros 1515 The imagination, improvising, translated burly leather to an overcoat of armor, converted brawn to iron. For wrinkled folds, die-tooled metal plates secured with welded struts. For mottled hide, stamped medallions and, bellywise, rippling bursts like sunspots Galileo's glass would mark a century hence. A submarine should be riveted so impeccably. A Swiss vault should be this stoutly tamperproof. Chimerical and mechanical, one foot in biology and the other in technology, Europe's debut rhino poses on a patch of stylized turf, outsize toenails planted squarely at the crosshatched intersection of hearsay, surmise, awe, and steely virtuosity. Making the most of slender evidence, the Master erred on the side of industrial-strength intimidation: spiked shanks, serrated hindquarters, vulcanized anatomy. Where here brute facts are lacking, exactitude takes refuge in preternatural convictions. Here, the prevailing temper called for ornament to shade into armament; ascertained a galvanizing center of gravity in a lordly girth; branded the newfangled implacable. Here, the spirit of revelation elevated the nubby backup horn to an exalted position, plucked from the creature's snout and stuck between the shoulder blades, a crowning touch. Did he clank when he walked? Could he so much as twitch his mistakenly furry ears under all that battlegear? Let us not dare to read the mindof the Almighty. The chronicles only tell us he was to be a king's gift to the Pope, an impenetrable marvel doomed to perish in a shipwreck en route to Rome. Lost to the deeps, he's already a full-blown apparition in the woodcut - a wonder reconstructed, a secondhand stab at a likeness. Palm-frond tail, barnacled jowl, muttonchops of bony matter - no question, he's more than a little clownish, our poor tinhorn monster: a bulky hyperbole, a Falstaff on all fours. Oh, but look him up and down, and it's amply evident allegedness has worked a certain alchemy on him. Shackle or tether would be superfluous: his fearsomeness has gone the way of all flesh, all this staggering regalia houses a will-o'-the-wisp. Lapidary in its declivity, his one eye's neither wary nor bellicose. In the shop he scanned sinewy fallen angels harvesting lost souls. Inked into his element, the perspective is reversed, and he broods, a dour nightwatchman, on the prickly heavens He's built to outlast edicts and categorical imperatives. Taxonomy can't touch him now. His burden's to be wise to the whispers that he's altogether otherworldly, he who was immortalized as a champion of the earthbound.