Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Albrecht Dürer
Indian Rhinoceros, 1515, The British Museum, London
stereotypical attitudes towards animals filter quite
seamlessly through these representations. The
producer, designer and viewer (the latter as
intended consumer) are forced into complicity.
In order to establish an acceptable
evolutionary model, it is important to compare
our episteme to preceding ones with regard to
natural history and representational strategies.
According to Foucault, the first division of the
Western episteme, namely the Renaissance,
consisted of a complex system of similitude, in
which the concern was not so much related to
the animals themselves, but to what they signified
for human beings. Developing from Medieval
bestiaries, strange and exotic animals were
assimilated into an existing cultural order which
was based on an emblematic, imperialist visual
tradition. The results of empirical observation
52
played a minor part in 16 th century
representations of animals: the normative, which
fitted into the cultural matrix, rather than the
observed animal, was represented.
A good example of this would be Dürer’s
rhinoceros (1515) (which became the
acceptable icon/emblem of the animal - even
though it differed from existing contemporary
empirical observations and studies of the actual
animal.
On another level, there was a great
curiosity for the visual relationship of one thing to
another - which favoured the symbolic - and
stood in opposition to the 16 th century rhetoric of
science, which has been described as
“diminished in visibility” ( Baker 2001: 20) due to its
fascination with the hidden, organic structural
connections between things.