Art Forms in Nature: Prints of Ernst Haeckel

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But the illustrations are other-worldly both in form and in the feeling they give: that rotifers, protozoans and medusae don't just inhabit scarcely-visible parts of our world, no they have their own world which we can barely glimpse into, as different and exotic as any science-fiction artwork. This was really great, but most importantly it will last -- for archiving, referencing, modifications, not just a book that'll sit on the shelf once perused -- all made easy with access to these lithographs. Powerful modern microscopes have confirmed the accuracy of Haeckel’s prints which, even in their day, rightly became world famous.

Not so mind-blowing in these days of high-resolution microscopy, but still pretty amazing from a technical drawing viewpoint. Although it contains a statement of most of the views with which Haeckel’s name is associated, it did not attract much attention on its first appearance, and accordingly, its author rewrote much of its substance in a more popular style and published it a year or two later as the Natural History of Creation ( Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte), which was far more successful (.

Haeckel’s literary output was enormous, and at the time of the celebration of his sixtieth birthday at Jena in 1894 he had produced 42 works with 13,000 pages, besides numerous scientific memoirs. It’s unfortunate that he was really into eugenics and scientific racism (I read some of his ideas on both and all I could think was “yikes”: his ideas fueled some of what the nazi’s used, even though they later banned his works, and his ideas about anyone who wasn’t white were appalling) so I can only appreciate his art and his scientific importance (he coined biological terms like ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista). This collection of plates was not only well-received by scientists, but by artists and architects as well.

Today, although no one is greatly interested in Haeckel the biologist-philosopher, his work is increasingly prized for something he himself would probably have considered secondary. Expect to see pages devoted to seaweeds, seaslugs, jellyfish, crustaceans, bats, fish and reptiles for example. Every living cell has psychic properties, and the psychic life of multicellular organisms is the sum-total of the psychic functions of the cells of which they are composed.Read this book for the "Reading Genres" book club "Eurobooks" meeting, for which I decided to concentrate on European entomologists. I had just bought this 'on spec', it is a real find and a very reasonable cost given the quality of the paper and printing! Darwin himself has placed on record the conviction that Haeckel’s enthusiastic propagandism of the doctrine was the chief factor of its success in Germany.

The plates illustrate Haeckel’s fundamental monistic notion of the “unity of all living things,” and the wide variety of forms are executed with utmost delicacy. The text accompaniment, appearing early in the book before the many pages of prints, is interesting. Moreover, the firmly established perceptions of mathematics and physics, which Kant explained as synthetic a priori judgements, originated by means of the phyletic development of the faculty of judgement and may be traced back to continually recurring a posteriori experiences and conclusions based thereupon.One prominent example is the Amsterdam Commodities Exchange designed by Hendrik Petrus Berlage: it was in part inspired by Kunstformen illustrations. He was a biologist who discover many different species, some relatively minuscule species - generally varieties of flora and fauna.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In addition to being marvelous renderings, these plates have long been noted for the peculiar emotional appeal that they have for most viewers, a premonition of surrealism with exotic organic life forms stretching back to their roots in the inorganic, and individual details drawn with awareness of subtle evolutionary changes and millennia-long developments.

It was he who first brought it prominently before the notice of German men of science in his first memoir on the Radiolaria, which was completely pervaded with its spirit, and later at the congress of naturalists at Stettin in 1863. In 1861, at the instance of Carl Gegenbaur, he became Privatdozent at Jena; in the succeeding year he was chosen extraordinary professor of comparative anatomy and director of the Zoological Institute in the same university; in 1865 he was appointed to a chair of zoology which was specially established for his benefit.