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| our elephant | the woodcut | the artist |
The image on our letterhead and print publications (and above) is based on a 1518 woodcut in the collection of one of our principals. The cut was taken from a drawing, by German old master Hans Burgkmair the Elder (1473-1531), that depicted Suleyman the Elephant, a present from the Portuguese King to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519).
During the Renaissance beasts such as elephants and rhinoceri were high-end status symbols, akin to the ostentatiously large and temperamental yachts owned by Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison and other digital moguls ("if you need to know how much it costs to run, you can't afford it"). To really impress the Pope (or another of the superpowers) you gave one of the designer animals, with retinue, ideally imported along with the beast from Africa or Asia. Some bolder monarchs tried to exchange whales but, like Albrecht Durer, discovered that leviathans don't travel well once out of the water. In 1514 the King of Portugal received an elephant and a rhinoceros from India. His gift of Hanno the Elephant to Pope Leo X (art patron, party animal, not a mate of Martin Luther) is described in Sylvio Bedini's The Pope's Elephant (Nashville, Sanders 98). A few years later Suleyman, an African elephant complete with turbaned Indian mahout and a support staff of thirty, was sent to Maximilian. Suleyman - a fine specimen of Loxodonta Africana - walked across the Pyrenees, through France and onwards to Vienna, amazing the populace and exciting interest as far away as Moscow. Poets wrote jingles in his honour. Folklore developed about his courtesy and wisdom: he rescued fallen babes, he genuflected to ecclesiastical worthies. His likeness features in The Triumph of Maximilian (1526), a series of large-format prints by Burgkmair and others illustrating the triumphal procession of the Emperor and his retinue, and in illustrations by Durer and Altdorfer. The historical Suleyman died at an advanced age, having outlived Maximilian and most of his contemporaries. His remains were preserved until a 1943 bombing raid on Munich.
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