Divine Beasts: Ned Denny on How Albrecht Durer's Prints Turned Even the Rhino into a Thing of Beauty. (Art)

Beginning of article

For an unofficial but illuminating prologue to the British Museum's Durer show, you need to go past the ticket desk, through the tapering Mycenaean columns and on into one of the strangest and most magical galleries in the building. In this long room devoted to pre-Hellenic Greece, among the rows of pots painted with electrified sea life and planet-eyed birds, is an image of a bull that forms a striking counterpart to Durer 's famous woodcut of a rhinoceros. Like The Rhinoceros (1515), the body of this majestic animal is divided into large, patterned sections that give the impression of chain mail or armour. It, too, has its horned head lowered, though less in a gesture of brute strength than of graceful submission to the …