Beschreibung:

Fantastical animal, probably a Leucrota, on a very large cutting perhaps always intended as a free-standing sheet, painting on thick paper [Germany, sixteenth century] Large cutting (in landscape format), with a centrally placed beast with a very large mouth, two fangs, long whiskers, a lolling tongue and a soft fleshy nose, an ungulate’s cloven hooves, one front hoof raised up, the whole creature primarily coloured in shades of brown with black penwork used to draw out heavy musculature, with its back a mass of folds of skin (this section separated from the lower part of its body by a coloured line rising in the middle into a coloured swirl), a tail which splits into five sprays of green hair, black lines touched with blue wash denoting the ground on which his hooves are standing, all within a ochre red rectangular frame, light plummet sketch marks still evident in places where a change in position of limbs and appendages meant that these sketches were not later painted over, some small restorations at edges with small areas of red frame completed where damaged, one area of picture (including tongue, lower lip but not chin, foreleg, small spot on edge of nose, this visible through backlighting) once damaged with losses of some pigment but not outlines, this skilfully restored with remaining pigments stabilised and losses filled in, lower outer corner in same region with damage to edge of leaf as well, and loss of a section of paper from area before animal’s raised hoof (mostly blank apart from tips of whiskers), hence laid down on nineteenth-century paper, the original cutting 170 by 420 mm., the larger paper mount 245 by 545 mm. The muted colour scheme, style of painting and the simple orange border all point towards German art of the sixteenth century (notably to miniatures in a travel account of Rudolph Pfyffer, from Luzern in the 1590s: see Buchmalerei des 15. Jahrhunderts in Mitteleuropa: Prag-Luzern-Engelberg, 2016, nos. 15 and 21), and the landscape format and content might suggest that this is from a book of fantastical drawings such as the Augsberger Wunderzeichenbuch (see the recent facsimile published in 2013, as well as the illustrations on the website of Day & Faber) or a manuscript in the Splendor Solis alchemical tradition. However, the subject here fits with neither of those two models closely, and would have been just as at home in a bestiary setting. It may have never been part of a book, but executed instead as part of a series of free-standing depictions of animals for the walls of a patron’s house. The comparison of this with other illustrations made on the southern border of Germany is interesting, and we might speculate that the strange subject matter of this illustration would accord well with the eclectic collections of Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) in Prague, where he assembled the largest cabinet of curiosities of his time and kept a menagerie of strange and exotic animals (including a lion and a tiger which were allowed to roam the grounds freely, recorded by accounts for compensation paid to their victims who survived). Some of the collection was sent some decades after his death to Vienna, and the remnant was looted during the Thirty Years War by Swedish troops. In 1782, the final parts were sold piecemeal to private collectors, and it is now scattered far and wide. The medieval bestiary tradition, following Pliny the Elder, describes the Leucrota as an animal which lives in India and can imitate human speech, and is formed by the mating of a hyena and a lioness. It is the size of an ass, has the chest and legs of a lion, but with cloven hooves, and an extremely wide mouth which stretches from ear to ear.