नवगिरे-तांबट आणि ड्यूररचा गेंडा...Had Navgire-Tambat Seen Albrecht Dürer's Rhinoceros?

I wrote a post 'गंगाराम चिंतामण तांबट: The Hidden Marathi Artist In A British Archive' on August 31 2011.  


There I said: "I wish to reproduce two pictures of Mr. Navgire-Tambat courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon collection. These drawings on paper were commissioned by Malet and the British artist James Wales.
How many better drawn Rhinos have you seen? Me none."

One of the pictures is this: 

A Rhinoceros in the Peshwa’s Menagerie at Poona, November 1790, watercolor and gouache

current location: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

In February 2014, I saw the following:

'Albrecht Durer's (1471-1528)  woodcut of a rare and novel beast is a magnificent product of the curious, questioning Renaissance mind.'

Courtesy: The Guardian and The Trustees of the British Museum.  

Regardless of whether Mr. Navgire-Tambat has seen the Durer's picture or not, he had seen a real rhino in the collection of Peshwa's.  That was not the case with Pieter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) when he drew a hippopotamus in 1616.

Daniel Margocsy writes on Nov 12 2014:

"...Large and aggressive, live hippos were practically impossible to transport in those days. In modern times, the first two hippos arrived in Italy in 1601, when the Italian surgeon Federico Zerenghi brought their skins from Egypt first to Venice, where he had them stuffed, and then to Rome and Naples, where he exhibited them. As luck would have it, Rubens was traveling in Italy at that time, and circumstantial evidence indicates that he probably saw these exhibits with his own eyes. Exotic animals were a prized painterly object, and it is no wonder that Rubens decided to picture this animal in his series of Hunts that he painted for Maximilian I, ruler of Bavaria..."

Location : the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany

courtesy: Wikimedia Commons