Paper Lion

A renowned drawing by Raphael depicts one of the great – and oversized – personalities of the Renaissance: the elephant Hanno, gifted by Manuel I of Portugal to Pope Leo X, an instant celebrity in the Rome of that time. Less than a century later, an elephant named Hansken arrived in Amsterdam, and was in short order portrayed in numerous drawings by Rembrandt. Hansken’s fellow attraction in the menagerie was a young lion, likewise depicted by Rembrandt in several drawings. One of them recently sold at Sotheby’s New York for a record price, as Massimo Navoni recounts here. The depth of the adolescent feline’s gaze – so calm, so powerful – evokes the lion rampant on the shield of the Dutch Republic at the time Rembrandt sketched it, fiercely independent and in its golden age. That heraldic lion wields a sheaf of arrows and a sword; this one, youthful, unarmed, and intent, sits calmly for its portrait.