The Artwork and Science of Ernst Haeckel Julia Voss & Rainer Willmann Taschen (2026)
To immerse your self on the earth of naturalist Ernst Haeckel is to fall right into a kaleidoscope of vibrant sea slugs, coiling octopuses, looping larvae and bulbous our bodies. These tantalizing creatures float and wriggle earlier than your eyes, mesmerizing of their curious contortion.
Nature at its weirdest: what metamorphosis reveals about science and ourselves
The Artwork and Science of Ernst Haeckel brings collectively 450 detailed drawings, watercolours and sketches created by this nineteenth-century German polymath. Inside its pages, umbrella-shaped medusae, or jellyfish, path their tentacles like ethereal bridal veils. Spiky radiolarians — microscopic zooplankton discovered all through the ocean — take unusual types, calling to thoughts beehives and Buddhist temples. Nudibranchs, a bunch of sea slugs, sprout fronds and tubules, and a few Siphonophorae — swimming colonies composed of hundreds of organisms referred to as zooids — resemble coiled intestines.
Born in 1834 in Potsdam (then a part of the Kingdom of Prussia), Haeckel was a biologist, evolutionist, artist, thinker and doctor. Amongst different achievements, he was recognized for defending Charles Darwin’s concept of evolution in an 1863 lecture in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland).
His concepts ranged from eccentric to eugenic. He thought that the only unicellular organisms possess an early type of the soul — the identical was supposedly true for atoms and crystals. He was additionally a racist who ranked “the varied kinds of mankind” based on their relative “worth”, horrifyingly describing “woolly haired” folks, whom Haeckel noticed because the lowest-value group, as “incapable of a real inside tradition and the next mental improvement”.
Ernst Haeckel categorized and depicted hundreds of species.Credit score: TASCHEN Cologne/Göttingen State and College Library
Haeckel accrued his concepts, each the intriguing and the odious, over the course of his terribly different profession, which started in 1852 with a stint at medical college. Whereas he was a scholar on the College of Würzburg within the Kingdom of Bavaria, his professors remarked on his present for “recording at astounding velocity exactly what he had seen”. One famous that Haeckel “was in a position to look by a microscope together with his left eye whereas concurrently attending to the drawing in progress together with his proper”.
However his tenure as a doctor was transient. He confined his workplace hours to at least one hour a day, beginning at 5 a.m., and took on not more than half a dozen sufferers ever. Haeckel switched his focus to marine biology and, in 1862, revealed a fantastically illustrated monograph on the radiolarians. These single-celled protists (most lower than one millimetre in diameter) take in silica from seawater, forming ‘skeletons’ with “interlacing spirals, spherical lattices, and minute pyramids with radiating struts”. His later publications included atlases and monographs on sponges, corals and jellyfish.
How the thought of human superiority over nature was invented
Throughout his 85-year lifespan, Haeckel recognized hundreds of species, together with two that he named after “my unforgettable pricey spouse, Anna Sethe”, who died of a burst appendix in 1864, 18 months after they married. The grief-stricken widower fled to Good on France’s Côte d’Azur, the place he came upon a jellyfish mendacity in a pool left by the ebbing tide. Its delicate yellow tentacles reminded him of his deceased spouse’s blonde hair, so he named it Mitrocomae annae (‘Anna’s headband’). The second species named after Anna was Desmonema annasethe — one other jellyfish, which Haeckel thought-about much more lovely.
“Attempt to think about the sleek, slim stalk of a flower, its leaves and vibrant blossoms as clear as glass”, Haeckel wrote to his mother and father of Siphonophorae in 1867. A few of his sketches had been recreated in glass. When Prince Albert I of Monaco opened a museum in 1910 on the Oceanographic Institute, a ceiling lamp was modelled on Haeckel’s drawings of medusae.
Likewise, a chandelier designed by Dutch architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage on the Amsterdam Inventory Trade was primarily based on Haeckel’s drawing of Rhopilema frida, a jellyfish named after his muse and lover Frida von Uslar-Gleichen (with whom he exchanged greater than 900 love letters throughout his second, sad marriage to Agnes Huschke).