The Rhinoceros

In the spring of 1515 the King of Portugal took delivery of a live rhinoceros, the first one seen in Europe in over a thousand years, sent north from India through the new trade routes. Word of it travelled up to Nuremberg as a letter and a rough sketch, and Albrecht Duerer, who never laid eyes on the animal, made this woodcut from that secondhand report. So he guessed. He gave it plates that buckle and rivet like a suit of armour, a small extra horn on its shoulders, and skin patterned like tooled leather. None of that is quite right. And yet the print was so commanding that people trusted it over real animals for the next 200 years, copying Duerer's armoured rhino into schoolbooks long after the actual beast had drowned in a shipwreck off Italy on its way to the Pope.