Returns of the Rhinoceros Anna R. Burzyńska Jagiellonian University 1. The Rhinoceros leaves Lisbon The most recent and spectacular return of the Lisbon rhinoceros took place in 2008, when it became the protagonist of a huge (the animal was depicted life- size) painting Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros 1 by Walton Ford, a contemporary American painter, who in his works, stylised as colonial illustrations, focuses on the relations between people and animals. Or, rather, he portrays the individual refected in an animalistic Other. Ford’s painting shows a ship sinking in a storm; a terrifed rhinoceros, his legs bound, tries in vain to escape from the wave-swept deck. The moment of the animal’s death will at the same time be the instant of its rebirth as a myth, a symbol, a work of art. The end and the beginning of an endless journey. The nameless rhinoceros, portrayed by Ford, had been a gift, in 1515, of the Sultan of Khambhat to the Portuguese Governor of Goa, in turn to be sent to Lisbon. King Emmanuel I, enchanted with the unusual gift – the frst rhinoceros to be seen in Europe since Roman days – arranged for it to have a gladiator fght with a young elephant from his menagerie, in order to fnd out whether Pliny had been correct in writing that the elephant and the rhinoceros were mortal enemies (the elephant scarpered; the fght did not take place), and subsequently decided to offer the animal in homage to Pope Leon X. The news that the exotic creature would be on public display in Rome enthused natural philosophers and artists, amongst them Albrecht Dürer, who decided to set off for Rome (on foot, as the story has it). However, the rhinoceros never reached Rome: the ship which was carrying it sank during a storm. Paolo Giovio 2 , a papal historian, wrote, ‘the animal famous for its outstanding ferocity, which would have been able to confront even an elephant in a fght in the amphitheatre, was abducted by the envy of Italian Neptune’, emphasising additionally that the heavy chains which bound the legs of the animal so adept at swimming made its survival impossible, and that the needless death 1 W. Ford, Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros, 2008 – watercolour; gouache, lead pencil and ink on paper; property of the author and the Paul Kasmin Gallery. 2 P. Giovio, Elogia virorum litteris illustrium, 1548, cf.: http://www.elfnspell.com/Paolo StartStyle.html, (date accessed: 4 October 2010).