Scientific Art of Ernst Haeckel

Shedding light on the microscopic organisms that inhabit the Earth, German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s extremely detailed drawings blur the lines between art and science.

“Nature generates an inexhaustible cornucopia of wonderful forms, the beauty and variety of which far exceed the crafted art forms produced by human beings.”- Ernst Haeckel

Created during the late 19th and early 20th Century, Ernst Haeckel’s successful drawings, watercolours and sketches became the foundation of his legacy. Haeckel spent his life researching flora and fauna to explain it to the public. In doing so, he drew hundreds of sketches of his findings which were published in several volumes, including Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms in Nature).

This research became the project that started his scientific career. But it was much more than that: Ernst Haeckel spent hours and hours looking through the microscope, mesmerised by the beauty of the creatures he had just discovered. And he drew them with painstaking care in his very own artistic style. The conflict between his love of art and scientific ambitions had finally been resolved. Below is a print of Haeckel’s original illustrations of radiolarians.

Almost as if to make peace between Ernst Haeckel’s two souls, his stunning biological illustrations were used by Art Nouveau artists to reconcile an ever more technological and industrial society with nature.

At the end of the 19th century, society was changing rapidly: industrialisation was growing and with it pollution, cities were becoming ever bigger and more chaotic. Art Nouveau artists wanted to reset the relationship between man and nature, so they looked to the natural world to inspire their art, design and architecture.

Below, for example, is a decorative chandelier designed by Berlage and inspired by the discomedusa drawn by Ernst Haeckel.

At the 1900 Paris Exposition there were more references to Haeckel’s work. For his ambitious “Porte Monumentale” in full Liberty style, René Binet  was inspired by animal and plant shapes, and the railings explicitly borrow elements from the radiolarians drawn by Haeckel.

Haeckel’s method was a holistic one, in which art, science, and philosophy were complementary approaches to the same subject. He “sought to secure the attention of those with an interest in the beauties of nature,” writes professor of zoology Rainer Willmann in a new book from Taschen called The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel­, “and to emphasize, through this rare instance of the interplay of science and aesthetics, the proximity of these two realms.”

Seen as a “visual encyclopaedia” of living things, Haeckel’s work remains remarkable for several reasons – its graphic precision and careful shading means the drawings can easily be seen as artwork, but they also give a detailed insight into the understanding of organic evolution. Paramount in Haeckel’s works is the emphasis on the essential symmetries and order of nature; even in the strangest of creatures, he managed to find a sense of biological beauty.

Within The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel, it is easy to see that Haeckel’s detailed drawings of organisms have an almost abstract form. The artworks reveal the geometric structures that are unexpectedly common in nature, with each organism looking almost architectural.

During a time where biodiversity is increasingly threatened, to know that these drawings are sketched from physical creatures living on Earth reminds us that the natural world is constantly surprising and beautiful – and this is a notion worth keeping in mind.