Rembrandt's elephant named for certain?
November 6 2013
Picture: British Museum
A new article published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society names the elephant drawn by Rembrandt in c.1637 (above) as 'Hansken'. The name Hansken had been attached to the drawing before, but new research apparently makes it as certain as we can be. The new research looked into what was the first 'correct type specimen' of the Asian elephant. That is, the first scientific description of an elephant to show what an elephant was (if that makes sense). And it turns out that the first specimen elephant seen, in skeleton form, in Florence in 1667 by the British naturalist John Ray, is thought to be Hansken, and that is the elephant Rembrandt depicted, for it was known to have been in Holland at the time. As the Natural History Museum says:
members of the [research] team are almost 100 per cent certain that this is the skeleton of Hansken, a female Asian elephant that became a travelling curiosity at the time and was known to have died in Florence in 1655.
Although Ray only saw the skeleton of Hansken, Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn painted the elephant from life when he saw it in Amsterdam in 1637.
This now means that Rembrandt's paintings and sketches are the original and correct portrayal of the type specimen of an Asian elephant.
Prof Lister said the team was excited to finally be able to assign the Asian elephant its correct type specimen.
Enrico Cappellini, lead author of the study from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, said, 'That you can still see it as a life drawing by Rembrandt demonstrates how science and art remain inseparable.'
The most prominent differences between Asian and African elephants are that African elephants have bigger ears, are generally larger and have more wrinkled skin.
It's all a bit confusing, but I think there's a snippet of news in there somewhere.
Update - a reader explains it far better than I have:
The news is that Rembrandt H v R has suddenly become a natural history artist, alongside people such as JJ Audubon, Gould, Maria Sybilla Merian etc. The relevant word is 'iconotype', ie the first pictorial representation of the first scientifically described specimen. Other artists drew elephants before Rembrandt, but Hansken was the taxonomic specimen used by John Ray.
Update II - Michael Robinson has all the Rembrandt elephant images on his blog here, and writes:
The elephant in question was a celebrity in Europe from arrival in Holland to death and is well recorded in print and manuscript-- Stefano della Bella drew a significant number of sheets, probably in Paris and finally in Florence, and it is definitely the same elephant in his etchings -- I think there can be no doubt, or as little doubt as is inevitable in all matters historical, that the skeleton in Florence is of the animal drawn by Rembrandt in Amsterdam in 1637. For me the clinching detail [...] is the wooden ribs, first noted by John Ray in 1664, for more see this long post at Nature.
What is very strange is that Pliny, circa AD 70, is very clear on their being two distinct and different types of elephant, Indian and African, I can not for the life of me understand where and why Linneaus went wrong -- the fetal specimen he acquired was known to have been brought from Africa by the West India Company.
