Bernard Siegfried Albinus

Anterior and posterior view of a skeleton and fourth order of muscles by Jan Wandelaar with Clara, the Indian Rhinoceros.A pupil of the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave, Albinus was the leading descriptive anatomist of his time. In 1718, he became Extraordinary Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the University of Leiden. In 1747, he published his most important work, Tabluae Anatomicae Scelletti et Musculorum Corpis Humani, with an English edition two years later.

Of outstanding quality, the illustrations for the Tabluae were ahead of much of what had previously appeared and marked a high-point in the close association between Art and Anatomy. Executed under Albinus’s direct supervision, the drawings had to meet his three rules – objectivity (precise depiction of form and location), symmetry (aesthetically beautiful with ideal proportions), and vitality (strength, beauty, and grace of movement).

The two most famous of the plates depict a rhinoceros calf with a horn yet to grow, drawn from the first living specimen in Europe by the artist and engraver Jan Wandelaar. Clara was an Indian Rhinoceros who had been gifted by the King of Assam to the director of the Dutch East India Company in Bengal and brought up as a pet until she grew too large for the house. She was sold to a Dutch captain and arrived in Holland in 1741 where she went on public exhibition becoming an immediate sensation; Albinus and Wandelaar were so entranced by her that they claimed her as the symbol of their work.

For nearly twenty years Clara travelled in style around Europe; poems were written to her, portraits painted of her, a hairstyle ‘á la rhinoceros’ dedicated to her. She was handled with considerate care and fed on a fine diet which included beer, wine and tobacco smoke being blown into her nostrils. Immortalised in memorabilia and the decorative arts, she is mentioned in letters and memoirs from Diderot to Casanova. Wandlelaar’s inclusion of Clara was to heighten the contrast of light and shadow, perspective, contour, form and size but also to delight with the addition of such a rare and famous beast.

The Tabulae was some twenty years in the making, thirteen for the artwork utilising a complex three phase grid system for precision and another seven for the engraving. Although widely criticised at time of publication for the very backgrounds that make it so desirable today, this innovative collaboration influenced generations of anatomists and artists, and is one of the most important anatomical works produced during the Age of Enlightenment.