Animals Strike Curious Poses Read online

  It is also written in the bestiary that, if the man sees the Wolf first, the Wolf will lose his rage.

  He called out to the Wolf—Brother!—before it could turn to face him. He spoke in his odd mix of Latin and Umbrian and perhaps, too, in his special, blessed tongue of wildness. Many stories would soon follow Francis that spoke of this wildness, and how it brought him nearer to his God. Learned men and women would write of how, when he walked the Strada Francesca, he scratched in the dirt to move worms from his path, thus saving them from trampling. Frogs quieted at his sermons, for he knew their language. When he sat in the mud and preached to birds, which was often, he chastised them gently.

  Look at you, birds, he said. You are swaddled in three layers of garment even though you cannot sew a stitch. You neither farm nor hunt, but are always fed. It is a wonder that so little plagues you. Sisters, your only sin could be ingratitude, for so many creatures contend with so much more sin—sin that’s bred from a deadlier wanting.

  To the Wolf, however, Francis did not speak of God’s generosity. Instead, he said, Brother! I know your hunger.

  To this, the Wolf answered, Lo!

  On the front door of the basilica in Assisi is carved a scene of Francis in the woods, opening his hand to the Wolf, which crouches below him. A fresco in the monastery at Saorge has the Wolf skinny like a cat, with three lizard toes—Francis’s fingers are raised to the beast in benediction. Four thousand miles away, over the door of the Chapel of Francis and the Wolf, is a lunette bas-relief of him pressing his palm to the beast’s forehead. In the garden of Gubbio’s Santa Maria della Vittoria stands a stone plaque of the Wolf on its hind legs, forepaws at Francis’s shoulders in a kind of embrace. A frontispiece to the Fioretti di San Francesco shows the pair approaching the walls of Gubbio, the Wolf heeling at the man’s side. And an altarpiece in Sansepolcro depicts the fearful town blocking their gates and a haloed Francis entreating them to clear the way into Gubbio. He holds the Wolf’s paw in his hand.

  By the end of the winter, Francis had returned to Assisi to beg on the streets for stones. News of his legend traveled back to Gubbio for the next twenty years. That he had found a pack of eleven men to follow him through Umbria; they howled in the woods as they walked from town to town. That, in their ravenous wandering, Francis threw prayers into the wind and gobbled them up for sustenance. That the five wounds of Christ appeared on his body while he starved on a mountainside, hidden in a dark wood rife with thieves. That, two winters after his death, he was already sainted.

  By then, Francis in Gubbio was barely a dream, like a story in a book that keeps rewriting itself. The Wolf, however, remained. For two winters after Francis left them, it visited Gubbio weekly. Any time the Wolf approached the gates, they welcomed it with affection. See the canvas in many-colored oils of the Wolf on a Gubbio doorstep, fetching scraps from a merchant. A mother and child look on, a dog sleeps near the Wolf’s feet, and Francis’s halo floats above the Wolf’s head.

  But they could not help but notice how greatly the Wolf had changed. A few in the town asked if the creature that came begging at their gates was still indeed a wolf. Does it still eat the wind when it is starving? Does it still hate the sound of clapping stones? Should travelers still sew a wolf’s eye on their sleeves to ward off the highwaymen, and should babies still suck on wolf teeth to soothe their gums? They could not decipher it.

  They began to wonder if hunger was the only difference between a devil and a dog. And since the Wolf was now something else, they wondered about the man who’d convinced them to tame it. If the Wolf is no wolf and Francis no longer a man, what did that make Gubbio?

  Their books told them nothing. It was not in their nature to answer this kind of inquiry. Those pages merely arranged the animal world—illustrated it—as a strange and unwieldy place filled with hunger and cunning, goodness and lechery. Choose one creature to honor, the books said, and one to hope you’ll never let inside yourself. Be the pilgrim, not the highwayman. Be the lamb and not the wolf. But nowhere in the books did it tell Gubbio the truth: You, citizens, will never actually be either.

  The wolf and the saint are more like one another than you are to either of them. For the hunger you know in yourselves, people of Gubbio, is not their hunger. Yours has no magic to it, and neither does your goodness. The beasts of your hunger and the saints of your righteousness will never leave your body to walk the highway together. Instead, they will remain, unbodied and uncertain, trapped inside your normal, human heart.

  Outside yourself, past the city gates and beyond the amphitheater, the earth’s Passionates might sometimes stand opposed, but they also twist into one another—swapping places, sharing legends. You, though, must only keep the news of them in your books. And in this, Brothers and Sisters, please take comfort.

  Be thankful that your hunger is not capable of magic. It is a blessing to be lukewarm and full of prayers that don’t wholly sustain you. So turn your heads from the window and go back to your fires, which are kept and modest. Labor inside the gates of your town and find the kingdom in your little picture books. Collect stones to build a church with high walls and towers and etch your saints and beasts over its doors. Pray safely inside that church for six hundred fifty years, and when the stones begin to give, do not let them molder like your old amphitheater. You must work many winters to refortify that holy church; rename it for your patron saint.

  And when you unearth its foundation: Lo! You will find the bones of a wolf—or is it a dog?—buried beneath the stones.

  We know that this is a rhinoceros, even if it isn’t.

  Professor Evelyn Welch

  ALBRECHT DÜRER NEVER saw the Monstrous Sow of Landser. Born on Suitbert’s Feast Day in 1496, the pig lived for only twenty-four hours, on an edge of Germany far from Dürer’s workshop. But news traveled faster than a body ever could, and by Easter, oddity-seekers all over the Empire had heard tell of the beast: a true Doppelschwein, with one head, two tongues, and no fewer legs than a spider.

  Dürer probably did see Sebastian Brant’s broadside when it made the Nuremberg rounds. Brant was near enough to go and view the Schwein while it lived, but the image it inspired in him was just a handful of thick, black strokes. In Brant’s woodcut illustration, the pig’s twin bellies touch and its four upper legs reach for their mates, as if courting a hug. Despite the two bodies converging in one head, it cuts a soft figure: more allemande than danse macabre.

  Even from his 250-mile remove, Dürer knew he could get closer to an image that satisfied. It didn’t matter that he lacked Brant’s firsthand knowledge; a juicy picture could be sold as “drawn from the life” if the artist had only seen a dead and salted specimen or the crude sketches of an eyewitness’s unsteady hand. Such was printmaking at the dawn of the Northern Renaissance, when half the world was built on hearsay, the rest on curiosity.

  So Dürer reimagined his Doppelschwein as a sow and not a piglet—an adult monster for an adulterated world. And where Brant’s woodcut is flat and simple, Dürer’s copper intaglio hums with depth. The pig seems to fight a war inside itself. Caught midbleat, it kicks its useless top-hooves skyward. All six bottom legs stand hatched in kinetic shadow, and its two tails unravel in countering spirals. The basic porcine details are impeccable—bristling fur along its doubled back and a mouth wrenched open to reveal two dagger-tongues, each pointing to a different patch of Landser turf.

  One print of Dürer’s Monstrous Sow would sell in Nuremberg for the cost of a sausage: a pig for a pig. Or rather, a pig for the world. All around the Free City’s markets—with their bratwursts and charms and broadsheet bestiaries—the shoppers sensed an anxious, almost giddy mutation in the open air. The city wasn’t growing outward as much as all Creation was launching itself up and over the city gates, and each fresh discovery brought with it a retinue of unknowns, as well as new inventions.

  Nuremberg had just seen its first globe and heard its first harpsichord. In 1510, the first pocket watch, called the
“Nuremberg Egg,” made time portable. And in the sixty-odd years since Gutenberg’s press, six million books had made their way across Northern Europe, many of them starting in Nuremberg, the town with the largest paper mill. For the first moment in history, there were more pages on the continent than people: collectible battle maps, erotica, loose-leaf poems about the rock of fire that fell from Heaven to shake Ensisheim.

  It was as if anything in your head could be confirmed by some far-flung report. Your wildest anxieties, your most Godforsaken imaginings—they could all be pulled out of the sky and made manifest in a woodcut of a nightmare beast, a fresh pox, or a folktale from the other side of a world that no longer had sides, as Magellan had just confirmed the Earth to be a deepening sphere.

  In 1515, another broadside arrived at Dürer’s workshop—not from Landser, but Lisbon. Some sultan had given the Portuguese king a nearly indescribable beast. It was a one-horned creature that fell beyond possibility, even in this century of the Landser sow and the double-necked Guggenheim goose. Unimaginable, even after the conjoined twins of Worms and the dog hatched from the egg of a bird.

  The animal was last spotted in Europe centuries ago, in the ancient Colosseum, where it gutted panthers and bulls with its single horn and then fell asleep on the circus floor. The emperor Domitian had pressed its odd image into long-gone bronze coins. Pliny the Elder was so impressed with it that in the year 77, he declared the beast the king-elephant’s natural rival, noting how, in a jungle battle, “it files that horn of his against hard stones” to stab the vulnerable pachyderm belly. But soon after that cameo in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, the horned animal disappeared from Europe altogether.

  When it returned thirteen hundred years later, Portugal’s King Manuel I remembered his Pliny. The spice ship bearing his living and breathing, two-ton gift docked in Lisbon’s harbor and he quickly matched this new beast against the youngest elephant in his menagerie. The day of the fight, a Sumatran handler named Ocem hid the new creature, which he called Ganda, behind a giant arras in the Ribeira Palace courtyard. The elephant was decidedly less impressed by that big reveal than the crowd of clergymen, court artists, and nobles in attendance. It refused to even look upon Ganda’s horn and stomped offstage without so much as a trumpet, Pliny be damned.

  But imagine seeing Ganda’s unthinkable form emerge from behind that tapestry. A creature you could never conjure on your own—bigger than the elephant, even!—with sectioned layers of dark grey hide, undertoned in pink, rippling over its skeleton like waves. What was a human mind to do with those comma-shaped ears and their distance from that squat, obscene horn? Who in Europe was prepared for those surprisingly small eyes fused to its cheeks, like mica bits in dirty marble? Not to mention the haunted way it rose to find its anger, seething rather than charging, as if the monster inside it just wanted to be left alone.

  Among that Lisbon crowd was a printer—a German expat who still kept ties with tradesmen in Nuremberg. He sketched Ganda’s hulking frame and giant horn, then wrote a description of the animal’s qualities on a single sheet labeled RHINOCERON. He then forwarded the loose leaf north with a note: “On account of its wonderfulness, I thought myself obliged to send you a representation of it.” And here, with this posted sketch, we see a creature split into two bodies.

  The first body is exactly what Lisbon saw: Ganda’s very skin, eye, and spike at the end of Ocem’s tether. This is the body born in Sumatra and miraculously still alive after a four-month voyage to Portugal. After the failed fight, King Manuel will ship this body to Rome to test Pliny once again—this time in a bout with the Pope’s white elephant, Hanno. This body will be wrapped for that voyage in green velvet and decked with carnations and gilt rope, perhaps to mimic wedding garb. The Ganda-body will make a pit stop to an island off Marseille so the king of France can wave at it from the shore. And two weeks afterward, that body will be chained to the bowels of the ship, still bound for Rome, when a storm sinks it to the bottom of the Ligurian Sea.

  The second body is the one on the single page of the German printer’s sketchbook—RHINOCERON—and it has so much further to travel. For RHINOCERON is not so much a body as it is the idea of one. RHINOCERON is a game of telephone, a centuries-long tumbling of names, shapes, misinterpretations, and forced significances. This idea of a body doesn’t need chains or a spice ship or an Ocem to carry it. It is the horned body of paper. It wanders, unwarded, far from historical account and into a kind of shared continental dream.

  This is a body born ages before King Manuel, when Emperor Domitian hammered the animal’s crude image into his jubilee coin. And while the natural Ganda-body disappeared into the water, this body never left Europe. As it moved through the centuries—in books and in lore—it dragged along Pliny’s claim of the elephant’s enmity. The body appeared in the book of Job, renamed “behemoth,” unfazed when the raging river Jordan flowed into its mouth. And in the medieval bestiaries, it somehow changed color; its horn grew sharper and went magical. Pliny’s fighting beast, which he called “monoceron,” then became the snow-white “unicorn” of the Middle Ages—a softer, godlier quadruped that man could only catch by using a virgin’s lap as bait. A near millennium later, in The Travels of Marco Polo, it was called “nasty body,” with a “pig-like head” burrowed in the Sumatran mud, “nothing like the unicorns of which our stories speak in Europe.” You can almost see Marco Polo, years away from his homeland, shaking his head in confusion: “This creature is entirely different from what we fancied.”

  In 1515, these two bodies, the animal and the idea of an animal, ended up on the same continent. A Doppelschwein of natural fact and storytelling, set to spar. And after the little sketch labeled RHINOCERON made it up the courier road and into Nuremberg, the two bodies faced off in the mind of a forty-four-year-old printmaker with his very own press and near-limitless access to ink and paper and talent.

  Albrecht Dürer had made his name on exactitude, especially when depicting living things. Look at the thousand-fold strands of watercolor fur on his Young Hare or the perfect gouache feathers of his Wing of a Blue Roller. In The Large Clump of Turf, every reed and moss-curl has borne his scrutiny, down to the serration of each frond. Such precision turns the clump into the whole kingdom of Heaven, as marvelous as any monstrous sow. “Don’t diverge from nature in your imaginings, thinking you want to find things for yourself,” Dürer wrote. “In that way you will be led astray.”

  But throughout his body of work, Dürer took glorious pains to indulge his wayward imaginings, his dreams, and his borrowed truths. He was as quick to paint a Venetian crab as he was a sea monster carting a bored Milanese girl into the water. The same year as his Clump of Turf masterpiece, he illustrated one of his nightmares with a matter-of-fact calmness, as if it were a landscape out his window. In the margins of his notebook, he sketched a blood-red rain that supposedly fell on Nuremberg in 1503, dripping crucifix-shaped droplets onto the apron of his housemaid. Dürer, a clear product of his epoch, saw the internal and the external, the commonplace and the unknown, as facts of his planet.

  A true artist, Dürer wrote, first masters the natural forms of the viewable world—fur, turf, wing—to fuel the more fanciful pockets of his art. One perfects the snout and the curly tail to earn the license to envision a vivid monstrous sow. Learning every ratio of a man, serpent, goat, and tiger lets one dream up an Apocalypse woodcut of a bishop falling into a dragon’s mouth. And when a spotty sketch of something called RHINOCERON arrives one day in Nuremberg, these skills are what permits a master artist to fill in any gaps as he sees fit.

  So this is what RHINOCERON is, according to Dürer. RHINOCERON is four stout legs and a head bowed low, facing left in a full suit of armor. RHINOCERON is a skeleton decked in seven fixed plates, each tessellated with its own scheme of sickles and ovoli. At the forearm and knee, these plates are seamed, like sleeves. And the sleeves have cuffs! A ring of dots, as if someone had pressed their thumb along the RHINOCERON like they would the cr
ust of a pie. The butt has a topline of hook-and-eye loops, and the hip is a dead ringer for a tortoise shell. Its forehead is a line of thorns, its neck a collar of scallops.

  In getting RHINOCERON onto the page, Dürer obviously borrowed from more familiar nature: hence the fuzzy sow’s ears (much less oblong than Ganda’s) and the paintbrush pony tail. Its scaled legs skew reptilian and its mouth is downright bovine. The nose-horn favors the unicorn’s—long and somewhat thin, and straightened upward to a near-forty-five-degree angle. It pushes that horn against the borderline of the woodcut, as if nudging the door of a cage. And of course, according to Dürer, it sports that now-famous extra horn, sometimes called “the Dürer hornlette,” which never appeared on a natural body. In the Dürer body, the hornlette sticks up—like a stiletto or a lifted pinky—at the nexus of the body’s shoulders.

  Why the extra horn? Why the gilded body armor? Was it misinformation—few know exactly what the RHINOCERON sketch from Lisbon told him—or was it Dürer’s own wandering mind? No matter what, Dürer’s animal image is both confounding and sticky. A new body presents itself at every glance; one viewing brings the familiarity of a low-eyed, four-footed beast, the next a still shot of a monster. Dürer has managed to represent both bodies—biological Ganda versus mythic RHINOCERON—and both realities—the natural versus the imagined—with a timeless artistry. To look at the animal body in that frame is to watch the weird and the comfortable in a battle royale. It produces a sensation not unlike that of pressing two magnets toward one another, poles aligned so that they shake.

  “They call it a Rhinocerus,” Dürer wrote at the top of the page. “It is represented here in its complete form.”