Albrecht Dürer’s first edition of Rhinoceros discovered in Czech Academy library
The Czech Academy of Sciences has announced an extraordinary discovery. One of the first prints of Rhinoceros, the famous woodcut by German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, dating back to 1515, has been found in the Academy’s library, where it has been stored since the 1950s.
Painter, printmaker, and writer Albrecht Dürer is generally regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist. He created Rhinoceros more than five hundred years ago, without ever seeing the animal. The rhino had been brought from India to Lisbon, and Dürer based his work on a written description and a quick sketch.
The image shows a powerful animal covered in plates of armour, with a collar around its neck, a small twisted horn on its back, and scaly, jointed legs.
Although inaccurate, it became one of the most widely known images of the animal in Europe. It was copied for centuries and was long believed to show what a real rhino looked like.
One of those prints has been stored in the Library of the Academy of Sciences for almost seventy years, says the library’s Markéta Kučerová.
“We know it’s been here since 1958. It was catalogued as part of the archival collection, but it was simply stored away in the depository,” she explains.
Surprisingly, the sheet had never been formally examined by experts and was thought to be one of many later prints. That changed during last year’s Night of Scientists, when Sylva Dobalová from the Institute of Art History borrowed the piece for a lecture and began to suspect it might actually be a first edition from the early 16th century.
She told Czech Radio what first caught her attention.
“Look at the thin black border around the rhinoceros — it’s interrupted in two places, on the left and at the top right. That’s precisely described as a feature of the first edition.”
The next key step was to uncover the age of the paper itself, she says.
“At first glance, I could see the print was old — the grooves cast shadows, they’re three-dimensional. Then we tried to shine light through the woodprint,” she recalls.
That revealed a watermark near the rhino’s head, depicting an anchor and a small star, a design that matched paper made in Dürer’s time, confirming the print’s early origin.
“This impression is considered by scholarly literature to be the very first one that came off Dürer’s press. Dürer himself probably handled and inspected it. It’s beautifully sharp and crisp,” Dobalová notes.
With this discovery, the Library of the Academy of Sciences joins only a handful of museums in the world that own a print from this first edition.
This Wednesday people will have a unique chance to see it in person within the Week of the Academy of Sciences open doors event.
