From Dürer to Walton Ford

Episode 75 of BBC Radio 4's excellent A History of the World in 100 Objects series was about Albrecht Dürer's "Rhinoceros" print. The print was very successful: "Using wood-block allowed him [Dürer] to print around four to five thousand copies of this image during his lifetime, and nobody knows how many millions have sold in other forms since. This image stuck. In works of natural history, above all, Dürer's rhino turned out to be unshiftable, even when more accurate depictions of the animal were available. In the seventeenth century, copies of this print could be seen on the doors of Pisa Cathedral and in a church fresco in Colombia in South America. It's appeared on ceramics everywhere from Meissen to Liverpool, and it's now a popular T-shirt and a fridge magnet."

Dürer, however, had never seen a live rhinoceros, which may explain why the depicted beast differs from the real one. It has an extra horn, and it is"covered with armour plating, not really skin, and that armour plating is worked just like metal armour - with swirls and scales and spirals, which manage to look military and decorative all at the same time".

The rhinoceros was inspired by a real one. In 1514 the Portuguese nobleman Alfonso d' Albuquerque, who established the Portuguese colonial empire in India, received the rhinoceros from the Sultan of Gujarat, and, probably not knowing what to do with it, sent it over to Portugal to his king. It created a sensation in Lisbon, and then the Portuguese king forwarded it as a present to the Pope in Rome. Unfortunately, it never made it there. "The ship carrying it was hit by a storm off La Spezia, and sank with all hands. Although rhinos are competent swimmers, since this one was chained to the deck, it also drowned."

In our own time Dürer's rhino has been reincarnated in a painting by Walton Ford, an american artist that paints watercolors of animals in the tradition of John Jay Audubon. Ford straddles the boundary between illustration and painting, as his work, although deeply naturalistic, is frequently disconcerting. There is something in a painting that enables a second reading. One can see that in his excellent Pancha Tantra, which by the way has become a favorite reading of my toddler children.

One of Ford's most striking paintings is The Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros, a retake of the Dürer masterpiece, where the rhino is shown dramatically at the moment the water comes gushing over the ship, on his legs. Chained on the mast, the rhino is meeting death.

Apart from the wrenching imagery and the vivid colors, it is the different conception of nature in the two works, Dürer's and Ford's that struck me. In Dürer's print, nature is powerful, to be admired, its strength resembling that of human manufacture (so witness the rhino's armor), but transcending it. In Ford's painting, nature is drowning, victim of human vanity and incompetence. The difference five hundred years have made.