Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice

At the Venice Carnival of 1751 the sight everyone wanted was a rhinoceros. Clara had been brought from India by a Dutch East India Company captain, and very few rhinos had been seen in Europe since 1515, when one shown in Lisbon became the model for Dürer's famous woodcut. She inspired poems, medals and tapestries, and fashionable women wore their hair shaped like a horn. Longhi puts her in a plain wooden pen, chewing hay. Her own horn is gone. The showman holds it up with the whip used to make her move, and most of the spectators behind the rail wear Carnival masks. Longhi painted the scene twice. The first version, for the nobleman Giovanni Grimani, is in the Ca' Rezzonico in Venice, and this one was ordered soon after by Girolamo Mocenigo. Clara was later taken to London, where she died in 1758.