One of a Kind: Clara the Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Venice and the Tale of a Missing Horn

Abstract

Abstract In 1741, a Dutch sea captain succeeded in transporting a live female Indian rhino calf from north-east India to his home town of Leiden. Named “Clara,” she was only the fifth Indian rhinoceros to be seen on European soil since the fall of the Roman empire and the only rhinoceros on the continent in the mid-eighteenth century. From 1741 to 1758, Douwemout Van der Meer displayed Clara across Europe to commoners and kings. In 1751, Van der Meer took Clara to Venice, to show her during Carnival. But en route to Venice, Clara shed her horn. Clara and the crowds that queued to see her—even in her hornless state—are recorded in the paintings and etchings of the father and son, Pietro and Alessandro Longhi. The article provides a brief introduction to Clara’s history and mid-eighteenth-century European odyssey, before examining her 1751 visit to Venice. At that time, the fragility of Clara’s status as the only one of her kind in Europe was further heightened by her shed horn, while rumors that she had been lost to the Grand Canal may be seen as an astute marketing ploy on the part of Van der Meer, and strangely prescient of the potential disappearance of both the rhinoceros and Venice itself.