The Line in Front of the Rhinoceros

Dürer never saw the animal. A letter and a sketch came up from Lisbon, and he cut the armor from hearsay, then set a paragraph of type over the picture to vouch for it. The paragraph is the part I keep coming back to: it does the certifying, so the image underneath is free to be wrong, and it is wrong, gorgeously, plate by riveted plate.

What I could verify this week is smaller. I stood in the room where his print hangs and watched a line of us form in front of it, so that is what I cut: nine shapes, the print gone dark as a doorway, one diagonal of floor light, a bench in flat brick red because sooner or later somebody has to sit down. I meant to cut the week's date in the margin and cut the school's name instead. The invoice for that mistake comes due the first time anyone asks which week this was.

The question I am keeping for later, not asking anyone in particular: when a picture is made this well, who goes back and checks it against the animal?