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(Originally posted September 5th, 2008)
 This very famous sketch by
Albrecht Dürer (as we see, done in
1502) is often held up as the "first"
naturalistic portrait of an animal
done by a modern European artist.
It is certainly not that (people had
been portraying animals realistically
for a long time, thousands of years,
in fact). But it is a wonderful achievement.
Dürer was one of the greatest artists
of the Late Renaissance (I place him
in that category, although the dating
of northerners in relation to the
Renaissance is a bit dubious for
everyone). This "hare" shows him at
his finest, with his supreme mastery
of the slightest details of texture and
light, and his wonderful sense of the
pose to be required of his subject.
This leads us to ask, "How did Dürer get the rabbit to sit still long enough?" This is not a
simple matter. The work shows not the slightest hint that the creature was imprisoned, or
(worse) dead and simply stuffed and mounted. Everything in this sketch seems to speak of a
living, breathing animal. Anyone familiar with rabbits will have seen this pose many times.
The answer, of course, is that Dürer watched and remembered. That is what makes this
work such an amazing thing: it is a feat of memory. One can only stand in awe of an intellect
that could remember what was captured by the eyes in a few seconds; the memory has
preserved the details of the pose, the fur, the face, the ears, and everything else. If you
needed anything to impress you with the power of human memory, this picture must surely be
just what you required.
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