Ernst Haeckel – philosopher, professor, physician, naturalist, biologist and artist. The pinnacle of his work – Art Forms of Nature - began publication in 1899 and is still an astonishing record of life on earth. When art and science combine, something sublime can come to pass.
Science and art – a gap, some might say a yawning chasm, has always existed between the two. Then occasionally, just every now and then, someone comes along who attempts (and succeeds) in closing the gap between the two. So it was with the German Ernst Haeckel. In 1899 he began to publish
Art Forms of Nature (
Kunstformen der Natur in his native German). A contemporary of Darwin, Haeckel would, through his lithographic prints, change the way that many considered the relationship between art and science.
