For over two C , Europeans picture the rhinoceros as more of a battering random-access memory than an fauna . The misconceptions are middling understandable , since there were no living rhinoceros around , and the widely distributed1515 woodcutby Albrecht Dürer largely specify the beast for the European imagination . The print , created from awritten descriptiononly , designate a rhino in profile , seemingly dressed for state of war and with a mislaid trumpet on its back . A German inscription atop the piece of work was free-base on an account by first - hundred Roman author Pliny the Elder , and claimed that the " degraded , impetuous , and cunning " rhino was " the mortal enemy of the elephant . "
Everything change in July of 1741 , when a real rhino make it in Rotterdam . Miss Clara , as she was eventually nickname , was an Amerind rhino who stimulate almost two decade of " rhinomania " as she traveled throughout Europe . She delighted nobles in the great European court , and wowed ordinary citizen in small townsfolk . In France , Italy , Germany , England , Switzerland , and Austria , artists capture her tough skin and gentle eyes ; she was immortalized inclocksandcommemorative medals ; poets write verses to her , and player composed Sung . In Paris , women styled their hairà la rhinocéros , with ribbons or feathers simulating a horn atop their capitulum . Everywhere she went , Clara do a sensation .
“ Had Van der Meer left behind a diary , multiplication of reader could have looked over his shoulder as he wrestle with the practicalities of have and enrapture the gruelling land beast on the planet , ” Ridley writes inClara ’s Grand Tour . “ The nature of his problems can be gauged , however , from an account of the attempted transport of a rhino within France in 1770 . For a undivided journeying enthral a virile rhinoceros from Lorient to Versailles , the Gallic government pay for two days of piece of work by carpenter , 36 by locksmiths , 57 by blacksmiths and 72 by a squad of wheelwrights . ( Despite all this , the resulting Wain still collapsed en route and many more man hours were ask to get the manful rhinoceros back on the road . ) ”
In other words , most rhinoceros travel Europe did not come well . The brute on which Dürer based his wood engraving submerge in a 1516 shipwreck off the Italian coast ; arhinocerosbrought to Lisbon around 1579 survive only a few years . By some reports , its eye weregouged outafter it tip a carriage of regal invitee in Madrid . Yet Van der Meer accounted for rest in Clara ’s fussy agenda , and although he was entrepreneurial with the medium blitz of posters that preceded each of her stops , he took the uttermost aid with her travel . For case , she was never led by a annulus in her nose , as was long practiced with enceinte animal like bulls , and she was transported from city to city in a Brobdingnagian wooden charabanc pulled by eight horses .
Frombronze sculpturestoporcelain oddity , Clara was observe in art at a level unremarkably earmark for royal house . In a living - size1749 portraitby French artist Jean - Baptiste Oudry , she stands regally in a agrestic landscape ; a 1747 etching ( above ) presents her against a sprawling background where sinister - skinned figures , palm trees , and a scenery of a rhinoceros goring an elephant all reinforce her exoticism . A1751 paintingby Pietro Longhi , now at the National Gallery in London , has a crowd of masked Venetians watching Clara . One womanhood wears a Moretta mask , known as a “ mute masquerade ” as it has no mouth , and seems to be regarding the looker alternatively of this celebrity fauna , perhaps asking who is being exhibited .
Clara even appeared in an influential eighteenth - centuryanatomical atlas vertebra : Bernhard Siegfried Albinus ’s 1747Tabulae Sceleti et musculorum corporis humani . Its illustrator , Jan Wandelaar , was among the earliest creative person todepict Clara , and thus one of the first to represent an anatomically right rhino . In two engravings , she appears behind flay corpses , both the rhinoceros and the analyze humans representing the cutting edge of anatomic understanding .
Clara died in April 1758 in London , 20 years after being enchant in India . While wild rhinos oftenliveinto their thirty , and intent ones a mo longer , Clara had live far longer , and traveled much farther , than was usual for an exotic animal in the eighteenth one C . Oddly , with all her renown , there ’s noclear causeof last , or record of what became of her clay . There are also no reports of public lamentation for this international superstar . Yet through the exist Clara memorabilia and nontextual matter , we can still witness how she radically transmute Europe ’s idea of what a rhinoceros could be .
