Albrecht Dürer

In 1515 a live rhinoceros arrived in Lisbon, a gift travelling from a sultan in India to the King of Portugal, the first such animal anyone in Europe had seen in over 1,000 years, since the Roman arenas. Albrecht Dürer, up in Nuremberg in Germany, never went near it. What reached him was a letter and a rough sketch passed along the merchant networks. From that secondhand description he cut a woodcut of the beast, and it is magnificently, confidently wrong. The skin is rendered as bolted plates of armour, a little extra horn twists up from the shoulders, the legs are scaled like a lizard's. He even printed a line of text across the top vouching for its accuracy. The real rhinoceros drowned soon after in a shipwreck off Italy, so almost nobody could correct him.

Dürer's armoured version became the rhinoceros in the European imagination, copied into schoolbooks and encyclopaedias for the next 250 years. And that is the point about Dürer: he understood the printed image as a new kind of power. A painting hangs in one room, but a woodcut or an engraving could be pulled in hundreds and sold across the continent, and he pushed that medium further than anyone alive, signing every sheet with a monogram, an A cradling a D, that worked like a modern trademark.

He was a Nuremberg goldsmith's son who taught himself to think like a mathematician about proportion and perspective, and he lived at the exact moment the Reformation broke over Germany. He admired Martin Luther and grieved in his diary over a false rumour that Luther had been seized. The engraving many take for his summit, Melencolia I from 1514, is a puzzle still argued over, a brooding winged figure surrounded by the tools of geometry, sitting idle among them.