Page 117 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

fig. i. Albrecht Diirer, Lion. 1521, watercolor and body color on vellum. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

coast in February 1516; Hanno, incidentally, Europe walruses are found mainly in the Arctic From Antwerp Diirer traveled to Zeeland,
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died a few months later. Both animals had sea and on the northern coast of Norway, where probably in the hope of seeing a stranded whale.
caused a sensation whenever they were seen. they used to be hunted for their ivory and skins. He recorded in his diary that: "At Zierikzee in
The French king Francis i traveled to an island Even in Diirer's time they were extremely rare Zeeland a whale has been stranded by a high
off Marseilles to view the rhinoceros, while in Netherlandish waters and completely tide and a gale of wind. It is much more than
Hanno was a constant source of delight for the unknown in southern Europe. They were so 100 fathoms long and no man living in Zeeland
inhabitants of Rome, so much so that Luther fabulous that the Norwegian bishop Erik Walk- has seen one even a third as long as this is. The
used that fact to mock the papacy for its frivol- endorf sent the head of a walrus, preserved in fish cannot get off the land; the people would
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ity. Both rhinoceros and elephant were sent to salt, to Pope Leo x in 152O, to show him the gladly see it gone, as they fear the great stink,
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Portugal from India; the newly established sea animal's physiognomy. That specimen was duly for it is so large that they say it could not be cut
route allowed, for the first time since antiquity, painted by an anonymous artist on a panel that in pieces and the blubber boiled down in half a
direct contacts with the heart of Asia. used to hang in the Curia Argentinae in Rome. year/' When Diirer arrived at Zierikzee on 10
Almost as curious as the rhinoceros must A German epigram added and later published in December 1520 he "tried to get sight of the
have been the walrus, an animal so strange that Gesner's Icones animalium aquatilium of 1560 great fish, but the tide had carried him off
Diirer adapted it for the dragon of Saint Mar- starts with Albertus Magnus' erroneous state- again." From the sixteenth century the dra-
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garet in one of his compositional sketches of ment that the walrus is the female of the whale; matic stranding of whales was recorded by many
1522 for a Sacra Conversazione. 20 On that occa- we are also told that the animal is found in ori- artists, so much so that it became a familiar sub-
sion, Diirer used his drawing of a walrus, a ental seas, where it frightened Alexander the ject of Netherlandish and northern German art,
beautiful study in pen and brown ink with Great and his army. This legendary and, of especially in the last quarter of the sixteenth
washes, which he had done the year before, course, totally inaccurate information appears and in the seventeenth century when it was
according to an autograph inscription (cat. 207): beside precise details about where and when the often charged with moral or political meaning. 24
'That stupid animal of which I have portrayed particular animal had been killed; we also learn For Luther, the stranding of a whale near Haar-
the head was caught in the Netherlands sea and that the head sent to the pope was exhibited in lem in 1522 was a clear sign of God's wrath. 25
was twelve Brabant ells long with four feet/' In Strasbourg on its way to Rome. 22 In the second half of March 1521, Diirer

116 CIRCA 1492