Ernst Haeckel
Portrait of Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was a zoologist at Jena who coined the word “ecology” in 1866 and became Darwin's loudest champion in Germany. Between 1899 and 1904 he published Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) with the Bibliographisches Institut of Leipzig and Vienna, a portfolio of one hundred plates lithographed by Adolf Giltsch from his drawings.
The plates turned specimens from the Jena zoological collections into ornaments of stained-glass regularity, and they fed directly into Art Nouveau design: René Binet's gate for the 1900 Paris Exposition was modeled on Haeckel's radiolarians.
Plate 85, Ascidiae, shows the sea squirts, fourteen creatures arranged on a black ground like pieces in a jeweler's window. The humble tunicates carry a family secret, since their swimming larvae bear a notochord, the rod that in vertebrates becomes the spine, making them distant but genuine kin of fish, birds, and us.
The works
Read the story: Ascidiae: How Haeckel Turned Sea Squirts into Ornament