Brutes and Beasts

Ungulates, swine, varmints. Since humans began to tell stories, they’ve used beasts to illustrate nature’s evils. And when man started painting, some of his first subjects were stampeding four-footed brutes. Sometimes these were images taken from memory, sometimes they were made up altogether. Sometimes, they were born from imagination but taken as fact—for example, Albrecht Dürer‘s The Rhinoceros (1515). Other times, in the case of Louis Renard’s fish illustrations, they were claimed to be factual but, well, were obviously not.