In 1515 a rhinoceros arrived in Lisbon, the first in Europe for twelve hundred years. Dürer never saw it. He drew it from a letter and a sketch, and this woodcut became the rhinoceros for the next three centuries.
Every line here was left standing by a woodcutter's knife; everything else was cut away. Watch them return in the order your eye finds them.
Dürer gave it plates like a suit of armour, a scaly hide and a small extra horn on its back. None of them are real, and almost everyone believed them anyway.
It is in the museum in the original printing, alongside the letters that described the animal to him.
Narwhal tusks sold as unicorn horn, mermaids stitched from fish and monkeys, and maps of countries that never existed. Four rooms, four hundred objects, and the stories people told about them.
Horns, bones and teeth, and the beasts they were taken for.
Dürer's rhinoceros and the other creatures drawn from rumour.
Sea serpents, phantom islands and the cartographers who drew them.