On 19 August 2002, a giraffe named Brownie died in the Qalqiliyah zoo, the only zoo in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Israeli soldiers invaded the city of 45,000 inhabitants. There were gun-shots, tear gas, and flare grenades. Brownie, in apparent panic, rammed his head against a metal pole and fell to the ground. In the morning he was found dead in his enclosure. Ruti, the female giraffe, lost her unborn baby ten days later out of grief. The two dead animals were stuffed by veterinarian Sami Khader and later housed in a specially built “museum” next to the zoo. Other animals that died in the zoo are also kept there, including a lion, a zebra, and a baboon.
Brownie, nine years old, originally came from South Africa. He arrived via Israel in Qalqiliyah in 1997 at a time when it was the agricultural center of the West Bank and the Palestinian city was not yet sealed off from the outer world by an eight-meter-high concrete wall.
Brownie’s journey from Qalqiliyah to Kassel has historical role models: the journeys of living giraffes. The first living giraffe is meant to have traveled to Germany in 1220 as part of the entourage of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. Documented in greater detail is the long journey of a Masai giraffe from Sudan to France—a political gift from Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, to Charles X. The animal’s arrival in Paris in summer of 1827 triggered an unprecedented giraffe fashion trend. The Austrian emperor received his giraffe the following year from Darfur. These orientalist transfers often preceded European expansion: a few years after Lorenzo de’ Medici got a giraffe (1486), the Europeans seized America. French troops went about conquering Algeria in 1830.
The Zoo Story is a model for narratives: a giraffe story for you to continue.____
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11.15. 2010
Khader was never satisfied with his rendition of Brownie. He wanted to make him defiant. He thought of Dali’s giraffes. A burning beast rising out of the desert, majestic yet doomed, an omen, a premonition. Giraffa camelopardalis, the camel leopard. Something of that. The camels tenacity but also the leopard - its cunning. The low crouch, taut muscles and bone.
Instead brownie looked goofy. Brownie looked sad. From certain angels he looked stoned. His eyes fixed, the transparent glaze of hashish fiend. A stuffed toy! thought Khader. A tourist trinket. Something they would sell in a kiosk in South Africa. Poor Brownie. His spindly, bow legs - how did they hold? His awkward neck. Always staining. Over-eager to please.
The look made Khader nervous. Too familiar. He had seen it a thousand times. The snaking queues at the military checkpoints, the humiliations, the gruelling walk through the hills and over the barriers made of dirt. He thought it was the name. Doomed from the start. Brownie. A darkie, a half caste. How could it be otherwise? A second rate citizen in South Africa exiled to Qalqilya Zoo, Palestine via Israel. History repeats, two years later the wall was built. At 25 feet it towered above him. He craned his neck to see beyond. Lashy, languid eyes stared into the distance as if trying to comprehend his hybrid world of crossings and up-endings. He foresaw. The at fateful night in 2002. Israeli soldiers invaded the city. The gun-shots, tear gas and flare grenades. It was too much for Brownie, he skittered, legs trembling, nostrils wide.
In the morning it was Khader who found him. The giant capsized. A prone giraffe, nothing more sad and ridiculous. The angle of the neck, its legs twisted in, the white belly. The procession of insects that arrived in a predicable, datable sequence. The image stayed with him. It haunted. The entire country, as far as he could see, was one heaving cemetery. On his way to his office he passed the old giraffe enclosure. At one time there were three specimens, a breeding pair. Now, it stood empty. A stomach, a shell, a last train station after the last train left to the last border of the last country. He paused at the fence. The signs had come loose, a few of the nails missing, skewing it to one side. Giraffe, a word originally coming from Arabic language, zarâfa, possible from Hebrew [T]ZaVaR (neck) - the irony of that. Born through that meeting, dying from it; getting it in the neck. He stared into the empty enclosure. The filthy floor. The smell that seemed to multiply, nourished by the heat, the cloudless air. He said, don’t worry Brownie, next stop Europe, how that, huh? The promised land. A place of rivers, grassy meadows, valleys. A place for a fresh start in life.
It took seven men to carry him out. Hired help, off the streets, it was easy to find, they massed on the corners in the settlements, help for hire, odd jobs, building, handy work, anything, professional men turned to labour, men who knew nothing about carrying and packaging; men who didn’t give a shit about a stuffed giraffe. Careful! Watch the neck! A support structure had to be constructed. Brownie was fragile. Brownie was precarious. Brownie swayed and dipped. Turned on his side, he resembled a tea fork, a spindly decorative pushing thing.
Khader sighed and looked away. He told himself it was for the best. He was happy to see him go. Let the German’s have him! Why not the Germans? A shared secret history, before the Jews, the German Templers who came to build the temple of God in the Holy Land in 1868. Why not a giraffe? Animal sacrifice, Sadaqah, a reward for every hair. He signed the release forms they presented him with a flourish. So many papers for one small giraffe. Permits and travel passes. The insurance, risk assessments and policy papers. He shook their hands and smiled. He watched from his office window. Seven men wrestling a giraffe, his legs tense, resistant, the tautness of the neck. Brownie somehow too big for his body; too heavy to hold upright. He didn’t fit sidewise on the truck, his head jutted over the edge. A red flag had to be attached, danger, like a silly hat, a ribbon in his hair. Brownie dressed for his journey. Auf Wiedersehen Brownie! Wow them in Europe.
A crowd of children gathered. Wide eyes, finger in their mouths; sullen. The indifference of Palestinian children, used to sudden departures, losses. The flag flitted, waving them goodbye as the truck clacked, clobbered over the cobbled roads, wheels pitching the ruts, the giraffe bobbing - Brownie bobbing! Through the hills, kilometers of asphalt road and then another kilometer of dirt roads. The truck at the check points, rumbling past queues of cars, the snaking line of people, women, children, young and old men, sellers, students, donkeys, creating a whirlwind of dust, leaving curses in its trail. The desert at night, how dark it gets, miles of black and then finally the glow on the horizon, yellow brown, the city gleaming. A torch-lit sky. Ancient, mythical. From the road it resembles a giant space ship readied for take off. Look at him go. Brownie soaring over oceans. Legs first, a reverse rocket. An overgrown flamingo cast down from heaven, betrayed of its wings. The ship’s slippery deck, swilling with water. Brownie below. He could see nothing. The crate shielded him. Just a clattering of boots, a slamming of doors, the ramp went down. Entering the country backwards, a breech birth. A crane waiting to greet him, straining its neck. Side by side on the docks. Like distant cousins, a secret genetic coding proposing precarious morphologies; a home coming.
In Kassel everyone loved him. They rejoiced. Sweeping black suits, gathering catalogues, coming up with countless occasions to turn their eyes upward. His expression! Priceless, so much anguish and sorrow packed into one small animal. So much symbolism. The Palestinian condition. Crowds flocked. The art elite. The media said he stole the show. Brownie posed for photographs. A full colour image in the New York Times. A beautiful French woman defied the “do not touch” signs and draped her arms around his neck. She wanted him. “How much for a stuffed giraffe?”
She didn’t understand, the work of art was conceptual. The giraffe itself was irrelevant worthless, a badly stuff effigy. Brownie didn’t matter. Brownie was just a prop in an aesthetic problem involving international relations. Politics and history. Other giraffes before him, knotting the latitudes and longitudes that net the globe. Lorenzo’s giraffe gifted to Florentines in 1486, an emissary from the Arabs; a messenger who has no value apart from the message. The Masai giraffe from Sudan, entrusted to the ménagerie royale in Paris in 1827. Impossible to transport, it walked the 880 kilometers to the capital, a looping rope around his waist, swinging with his stride. His arrival! A full-on giraffe fad. Children bought giraffe shapes gingerbread biscuits. Mothers wore their hair à la girafe. The newspaper reported, “His Majesty wished to see this singular quadruped walk and even run; the entire court was present and her gaits, especially running, appeared completely extraordinary.”
Here the challenge was classification. The giraffe was an empirical observation, a data point, an instantiation of the scientific law, to be mastered then discarded. Once mapped, the giraffe was demystified, inscribed in a spatial geography that enforced and legitimated imperial modernity. De-animated, it could be instilled with the grid of taxonomy, delivered as an object on display to consumption and spectacle clothed in scientific terms.
Brownie went along with it. He had no choice. Mute, stupid, he asked important art questions: political power, relational aesthetic, the role of the viewer, their complicity with the system. He became a container, not a giraffe but a symbol, a signifier that defies the signified, an open sign: Do not touch.
The French woman didn’t care. She had travelled from Paris. She was besotted. Her beautiful, serene face suddenly twisted and distant. She couldn’t describe it... the feeling of witnessing not just a strange exotic animal but a member of something akin to a parallel culture, something that transcended reason and biology, that reached through time and space.... The abstraction of his markings, like a dislocated map, a distant continent exploding into a thousand pieces, his strange and the uncanny form - and that neck! It made her feel flushed and woozy. She strained. She ran her hand. Pushed her face, rubbed her head under his spell, lets the stale sawdust smell overwhelm her.
Back in Qalqiliyah Khader went about his business. Walking past the cages in the late afternoon. Eerily quiet that day. Outside, the roaring had ceased. The demolition machines stiffened into angular postures of defence. The wrecking ball sunk to rest. In the distance a monkey’s screeching broke the silence. He passed through the old petting zoo, pausing to pick up a rusted can on the ground. Drops of sweat trickled down the edge of his cheek, vanishing into the sweltering dust. A few meters away the bear pool was almost dried up. A chain-link fence, a weathered sign warning: KEEP OUT. The mesh peeled away from a post. He stepped over, out onto a platform used for feeding time. The planks were missing in places, weeds in the gaps, dirty meter of water below. From here he could see almost the entire zoo, the stretch of the grounds, the brick wall and beyond that, the other wall. Its observation posts, like two giraffe heads rise up from the concrete - metal skeletons clad with camouflage material. To his left was empty giraffe enclosure. Further along the two surviving zebras, listlessly swinging their tails. Skinny, covered in flies, recalling the donkeys at check points, heads hung low and ribs poking through like stripes.
Khader turned away. He felt suddenly tired. He turned and crossed slowly towards the museum, a sad hybrid, corrugated metal roof above a clapboard exterior. Inside the artificial light was cool. It spread over everything, casting flora-shaped patterns, dark shadows below the animals like dipping pools. He closed the door and breathed. “What are we going to do, huh?” The stuffed monkey grinned back at him. Something human, all too human, about its naked frozen face. Here at least things felt alive. Monkeys, gazelles, hyenas! “Robin” the lion, with his air of indifference, his lazy insubordination. The three zebras that had died from tear gas inhalation in 2002, resurrected in a flurry of hooves and stripes. He thought if supplies ever came he’d be able to finish work on the baby ape he was preparing. Supplies were always the biggest challenge. The endless negotiations at checkpoints. He joined the queue, his ears catching sentences and fragments: They will not allow anyone to pass, only those who have a permit from the civil administration. He showed his permit, his identity card. He said, “Doctor,” always doctor, a small lie, not even - an exaggeration. He looked straight at the soldier. The sun broiled above him, a salty sweat streamed down his necks, clouding his eyes.
He touched Robin’s head. He said, “Soon, soon,” picturing of the remaining castrated male lions, three tawny mounds buried in the tiny pool of shade in their cement enclosure. He imagined a pride. He would install then in the front of the museum. Pride of place. He closed his eyes and divined future extinctions: grassy plains in picture books for children, a region swarming with happy apes, springbok and giant buffalo, majestic lions basking in the neon sunshine.
Sometimes he dreamed the museum was filled with children, all those that died in the Intifada, perfectly preserved, captured in action: their sharp little feet, the heads with their neatly finished chins and ears, glass eyes frozen as if in fear, palpable fear - what workmanship! He shook himself back to reality. He crossed towards the far end of the room. His workbench, a humble sheet of wood with trestles for legs, his tools laid out in neat rows. The ape was progressing, the skin was nearly prepared - an oily black shell, the blueprint, smooth and moist as his own.
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03.06. 2009
wat küt dat küt
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03.03. 2009
Deine Mudda is ne Giraffe!
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04.23. 2008
2002 stellt paul caesar cumconcock "o.T." aus, eine ausgestopfte afrikanische giraffe, die 2002 im künstlerhaus bregenz präsentiert wurde !
Anonym
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10.30. 2007
soll brownie doch sterben wen juckt das!
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09.16. 2007
Die Kinder in meiner Klasse mögen Brownie die Girafe. wir sind auch traurig, das er nach Palestina zuruekmuss.
Lars
Lars
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09.11. 2007
http://lunettesrouges.blog.lemonde.fr/2007/09/11/trop-noir-trop-politique-kassel-2/
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09.05. 2007
nichts als männer
Anonym
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09.02. 2007
?
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09.02. 2007
per vederti meglio
p
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09.02. 2007
ma perché la giraffa ha il collo lungo?
t
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09.01. 2007
Jamil Tarifi built the roads for Jewish settlers. Nobody talks about it. Jamil, the giraffe is watching you.
Fuck you.
Anonymous
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09.01. 2007
Danke für ein bisschen Wirklichkeit.
Love,
Juliane
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08.30. 2007
Der Kasseler Brownie ist im Sommerloch verschwunden, wie die ganze Documenta 12. Trotzdem gehen alle noch hin. In den Medien melden sich wieder erbarmungslos inkompetente Politiker zurück (Abbas, Olmert), die alles tun, um nicht von der Bühne abtreten zu müssen. Wenn dieses flüchtige Bild, wie anzunehmen ist,zur künstlerischen Intention gehört, kann man dem nur zustimmen.
Anonym
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08.25. 2007
you are right--peter and jerry from albee's zoo story and the tom & jerry episode with the giraffe.
jana
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08.23. 2007
no +
Anonymous
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08.17. 2007
stoisch wie die elefanten, die flaubert so bewunderte. wuerde man kurt beck oder roger buergel ausgestopft hinstellen, dann wuerden sie wahrscheinlich ewig weiterquatschen. brownie ist viel beredter. mit authentisch oder korrekt hat das nichts zu tun. aber der trick "document" statt "documentation" funktioniert wunderbar.
sebastian
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08.12. 2007
news from qalqilya zoo
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=23769
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08.10. 2007
brownie non era nemmeno gay. Genet e gli eroi della rivoluzione palestinesi sono tutti spariti.
Anonymous
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08.10. 2007
il linguaggio giraffa = comunicazione nonviolenta.
c'era una volta anche una giraffa gay, a oslo mi pare.
renato
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08.09. 2007
Wie bekommt man eine Giraffe in einen Kühlschrank?
Man öffnet den Kühlschrank, stellt die Giraffe hinein und schließt die Tür.
Wie bekommt man einen Elefanten in den Kühlschrank?
Man öffnet den Kühlschrank, holt die Giraffe heraus, stellt den Elefanten hinein und schließt die Tür.
Der Löwe hält seine jährliche Konferenz der Tiere ab. Alle Tiere sind gekommen, bis auf eines. Welches fehlt?
Der Elefant fehlt, denn er befindet sich im Kühlschrank.
paola
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08.09. 2007
I remember the rock carving of the first giraffe in the Niger Sahara, 9,000 years ago. A painting in Namibia shows a giraffe's head emerging from behind the clouds. Annother engraving in Libya shows a man making love with a giraffe... Thanks for showing us the real Brownie.
Mark
Mark
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08.09. 2007
paul
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08.05. 2007
Elefanten sind auch Tiere, vergessen Sie das nicht.
Anonym
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08.04. 2007
es sind diese subliminalen dinge, die die realität in bereiche vorlassen, die man ohne diese nicht öffnen würde oder könnte. brownie eröffnet durch die bloße anwesenheit möglichkeiten des denkens und die ganze kunst, die um sie tobt, verblasst ob ihrer unschuldigkeit. menschen sind unklug und bisweilen böse und wir alle sind ein teil des problems, aber auch der lösung. danke brownie, danke peter friedl.
carl michael
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07.27. 2007
Ich finde es eine tragische Geschichte. Aber ich finde es auch mal gut den Krieg durch andere Mittel zu zeigen und nicht nur durch die täglichen Bilder die man sieht. Brownie war auch ein indirektes Opfer vom Israel-Palästina Krieg!
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07.25. 2007
ich bin froh, dass auch Giraffen sterben!
ina nobody
Anonym
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07.25. 2007
El interés en Gaza por los animales exóticos no termina en Sabrina. Una mujer intentó cruzar la frontera con Egipto con tres crías de cocodrilo acodonadas a su cintura y con las mandíbulas atadas...
(El Mundo, 11 de julio de 2007)
Anonym
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07.20. 2007
Remember Max the gorilla in Johannesburg Zoo - best known for his crime-fighting activities...
Anonym
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07.17. 2007
Remember Ham story. Not so long ago, during Cold War. Ham a chimpanzee. From Cameroon jungle / to USA laboratory / to space / living and back for the first time on earth.
Ham forever hero for our Humanity-Zoo Story
Anonymous
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07.12. 2007
Ein paar Tage, nchdem der "befreite" BBC-Reporter Alan Johnston der Presse praesentiert wurde, eine weitere Hamas-Erfolgsmeldung: Sabrina wurde wieder eingefangen. Sabrina war die Loewin, die im November 2005 zusammen mit zwei arabisch sprechenden Papageien von einer bewaffneten Gang aus dem kleinen Zoo in Gaza gekidnappt worden war. Suot al-Shawaa von der Zoodirektion hatte eine Belohnung von 1000 $ ausgesetzt fuer Informationen, die zu Sabrinas Heimkehr fuehren wuerden. Kaempfer der Hamas befreiten Sabrina am Montag aus der Gewalt eines Drogenrings. Die Loewin sei in einem schlechten Zustand, sagt der Tierarzt. Sie sei unterrnaehrt, es fehlten ihr Zaehne, Klauen und ein Teil des Schwanzes.
Anonym
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07.12. 2007
I've only seen Brownie on pictures. If my little son saw it, he would probably thought immediatly of his little plastic toy Sophie la Girafe. However if one Brownie is physically in Kassel, girafe is a word originally coming from arabic language, zarâfa, and also not only for Qalqiliyah, South Africa, Austria, France...
Isn't it right that words & images are moving easier than faster animals?
Anonym
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07.12. 2007
bin sehr betroffen von dieser giraffengeschichte und ihnen dankbar , dass zumindest im rahmen der kunst, die geschichte dieser giraffe und der menschen um die giraffe eine art neuen lebensraum finden können.
(vielleicht ist kunst ganz einfach lebensraum? )
im buch leo frobenius, kulturgeschichte afrikas,gibt es ein ausführliches und spannendes kapital über tierfabeln.
es scheint die erste und immer noch eindrücklichste art der erzälung unter menschen gewesen zu sein.
miray
Anonym
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07.12. 2007
A Giraffe in Florence
To collect exotic animals of various kinds was a common hobby among Renaissance princes, not least in Italy. The dukes of Milan kept English dogs, leopards, and hunting birds; the pope had elephants, rhinoceroses, and Hungarian bears; the duke of Calabria had a great number of leopards, camels, ostriches, deer, and swans; the Malatesta of Rimini kept elephants; and there were lions and eagles in Venice, Ferrara, and Naples. In addition they all owned racehorses, often of the finest Arabic breeds. Giraffes were an obvious addition to these collections, and there would have been many more of them if they had not been so notoriously difficult to get hold of. The first giraffe brought to Europe was a present to Fredrick II of the Two Sicilies, given in 1221 by the sultan of Egypt in exchange for a white bear. In the fifteenth century, the duke of Calabria was another proud giraffe owner, and so was Duke Hercules I in Ferrara and the Ferrante, rulers of Naples.
In the Middle Ages animals had played a role above all for the moral lessons they could teach; they were signs sent by God that had to be interpreted before they could be understood. As such they always had more to tell about the Europeans themselves than about the foreign, faraway places they had come from. Because everyone knew that fantastic animals existed—compare the bestiaries produced by medieval monks or the monsters in the margins of medieval maps—people were not necessarily all that surprised when they actually saw one. Moreover, curiosity regarding the exotic was, officially at least, taken to be a great sin. As St. Augustine had explained, the overly curious were prying into the forbidden secrets of God's creation, and they did so only at their own peril.
By the Renaissance, people looked at exotic animals with new eyes. In general there was a great desire for new visual experiences; people took an enormous joy in looking at the unexpected, the monsters, prodigies, and the freaks. Even though people refuse to give a farthing to "a lame beggar," as William Shakespeare put it, "they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian" or a "painted fish." The emphasis was on the marvelous. When suddenly seeing something that surpassed the expected in beauty, diversity, or abundance, the mind was overwhelmed. People were first astonished, then delighted, and finally excited. Clearly there was something highly addictive in this mixture of emotions. It piqued people's curiosity, and once they had seen a little, they wanted to see more. Obviously, in terms of height and sheer impact, there was no more marvelous, or more curious, animal than a giraffe.
At the time, meaning was more than anything made through analogies.16 Analogies revealed similarities between things, or hidden essences of some kind. There was a hidden affinity, for example, between stars and diamonds because both were shiny objects embedded in dark matter, and walnuts made you intelligent since they resembled the shape of a brain. This is why Renaissance rulers collected wild animals. They were rare and strange looking and as such perfect sources of marvel, and through the analogies they invoked, they served to enhance the ruler's claim on power. A prince who owned ferocious and awe-inspiring animals would himself come to be regarded as ferocious and awe-inspiring. Not surprisingly, the lions' den was usually located near, or in, the government palace, and this was also why the princes included rhinoceroses, elephants, camels, and ostriches in their triumphal processions whenever they had won a war or concluded a particularly advantageous peace.
The vast majority of foreign animals kept in Italy had come from Muslim rulers—initially from the sultan of Egypt and, after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, from the sultan of Istanbul. This Muslim connection gave the animals in question an added aura of mystique. The European image of Turkey was complex. On the one hand, the Turks were regarded as brutal, misogynistic, and unspeakably cruel, and everyone agreed that they embraced a demonic religion. In addition, in the 1480s at least, the Turks posed a real military threat to central Europe and to the Italian peninsula. On the other hand, there was a strong fascination with things "Oriental." The Oriental signified opulent splendor, absolute power, and sexual license. In order to learn more about this exciting world, Italian princes dispatched their best painters to Istanbul—the Venetian Gentile Bellini led the most famous such mission in 1479. In the pictures they brought home the surprised Italians saw men with strange headgear and big baggy trousers, and beautiful women sequestered in harems.
The enormous zoological gardens maintained by Muslim rulers—known as a serraglio, from the Turkish saray, meaning "palace" or "court"—were integral parts of this world, and before long every Italian ruler wanted one. Naturally Florence had its own collection of animals; in fact, its zoo was the most impressive in all of Italy. There were no fewer than twenty-five lions living in the Palazzo Vecchio itself, and the Florentine leopards, used for hunting, were rightly famous across Europe. In addition there were tigers, bears, bulls, wild boars, Arabic horses, and greyhounds. The Medici family had its own private collection of animals at their villa in Fano—in fact, commonly referred to as a serraglio. Since Florence, officially at least, was a republic, the municipal menagerie served to give glory to the city, while the Medici menagerie emphasized the family's status as primi inter pares.
The position of the Medici family relied heavily on their ability to provide games, jousts, processions, and tournaments for the entertainment of their fellow Florentines. In this respect they behaved just like the aristocratic families of Rome—the mecenas—whose positions of authority depended on their ability to provide bread and circuses for the plebes. In fact, some of the Medicean entertainments had direct Roman precedents. A favorite Roman pastime had been to stage combats between incongruous animals—bears were pitted against leopards, or tigers against parakeets with clipped wings—and when Pope Pius II visited Florence in 1459, the city decided to revive this tradition. The streets leading up to the Piazza della Signoria were blocked off for the occasion, and first lions were let loose in the improvised arena, then wolves, wild boars and horses, bulls, and Corsican dogs. A giraffe was also present, but only in the form of an immense mannequin. Inside the animal, twenty young men were hidden whose job it was to try to agitate the lions and make them go on the attack. Despite their best efforts, the spectacle ended in failure. The lions were not hungry, and the crowds jeered.
The giraffe situation improved dramatically in 1486 when a real example of the species was presented to Lorenzo il Magnifico by Al-Ashraf Kait-Bey, the Mamluk sultan of Egypt. The Florentines were on good terms with all Muslim rulers, but above all with the Turks because they were at war with the Venetians—Florence's main Italian rival—and because the Turks favored the Florentines as trading partners in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet this particular giraffe came from Egypt, and this for a particular reason. Since 1467, the Mamluks had been in open revolt against the Turks who occupied their country. The giraffe was an attempt to establish good diplomatic relations with the Florentines in order to make them intervene on their behalf in the inter-Muslim conflict. As far as the Mamluks were concerned, the giraffe played much the same role in their foreign policy as pandas did in the foreign policy of China in the 1970s.
The animal itself, when it arrived, caused a great sensation. It was eulogized by poets such as Angelo Poliziano and Antonio Costanzo, and immortalized in many paintings, not least in the "adoration of the magi"—pictures of the three kings giving presents to baby Jesus, a motif which gave free range to the painters' Oriental fantasies. Much of the time, however, the giraffe simply wandered about in the streets, enjoying the adulation of the crowds. As Antonio Costanzo described the scene, "I have also seen it raise its head to those onlookers offering to it from their windows, because its head reaches as high as eleven feet, thus seeing it from afar the people think that they are looking at a tower rather than an animal. Ours appears to like the crowd, it is always peaceable and without fear, it even seems to watch with pleasure the people who come to look at it."
Although Florence itself was landlocked, a successful war against Pisa in 1421 had given the city access to a good port at Livorno, and soon Florence produced a series of remarkable explorers. Together with their Genovese colleague Cristoforo Colombo, the likes of Giovanni da Verrazzano took up service with foreign rulers, and before long they were off exploring foreign lands and winning fortune and fame for themselves. Amerigo Vespucci—who in 1507 was to give his name tono fewer than two recently discovered continents—was the most famous of these sea captains. Although there are no records of his exact whereabouts in the year 1486, it is easy to imagine him cheering on as Lorenzo's giraffe made its triumphal entry into the city. At any rate, only a few years later, in 1497, he equipped a ship and set sail for what was to become the Americas.
Anonym
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07.11. 2007
Knut, Du bist mein Leuchtspurschuss, mein Streif, mein Einschlag, mein Dum-Dum-Geschoss! Du bist das Eistier in der Löwengrube, Du bist der Künstler mit dem weißen Fell, der Flausch, der Schönsinn mit den blut'gen Leffzen, Knut ich will Dir huldigen, wenn Du stolz und ungebärdig zum Giraffenmörger wächst!
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07.10. 2007
It's about a Lion and a Rat : just read (or read again) Jean de La Fontaine.
About kings and servants
About us, and smaller than us
Anonymous
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07.10. 2007
so it's Israel's "invasion" that is at fault, you anti-semitic Jew-murdering kraut?
Anonymous
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07.10. 2007
so it's Israel's "invasion" that is at fault, you anti-semitic Jew-murdering kraut?
Anonymous
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07.03. 2007
Hi Peter,
I couldn't find the Lageux article you mentioned but it's quite fascinating. I like the Melinda giraffe.
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jwh/17.4/ringmar.html
Love,
Norman
Anonym
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06.23. 2007
eine bitte für die recherche:
gibt es eine möglichkeit, das genaue geburtsjahr der giraffe zu erfahren?
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06.18. 2007
una giraffa in uno sfondo azzurro blù
cucita come se fatta in casa
il collo come un calzino di un bambino
instabile come appena nata rattoppata come un poveretto
auslaendar dopo morta
per favore almeno una canzone
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06.16. 2007
Brownie freut sich, wenn Ihr alle kommt!
Anonym
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06.14. 2007
in der schule haben wir davon gehört und gedrauert den wir alle sind tier freundlich wir gehen in die sieburgschule in bad karlshafen dem nächst ist die dokumenta in kassel darauf fruen wir uns alle
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