The art and science of Ernst Haeckel Julia Voss and Rainer Willmann Taschen (2026)

To immerse yourself in the world of naturalist Ernst Haeckel is to fall into a kaleidoscope of vibrant sea slugs, coiled octopuses, looping larvae and bulbous bodies. These tantalizing creatures float and writhe before your eyes, mesmerizing with their curious contortion.

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The art and science of Ernst Haeckel brings together 450 detailed drawings, watercolors, and sketches created by this 19th-century German scholar. Within its pages, jellyfish or umbrella-shaped jellyfish trail their tentacles like ethereal bridal veils. Spiky radiolarians (microscopic zooplankton found throughout the ocean) take on strange shapes reminiscent of beehives and Buddhist temples. Nudibranchs, a group of sea slugs, sprout leaves and tubules, and some Siphonophorae (swimming colonies composed of thousands of organisms called zooids) resemble coiled intestines.

Born in 1834 in Potsdam (then part of the Kingdom of Prussia), Haeckel was a biologist, evolutionist, artist, philosopher and doctor. Among other achievements, he was known for defending Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution at an 1863 lecture in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland).

His ideas ranged from the eccentric to the eugenic. He thought that the simplest single-celled organisms possess a primitive form of the soul; the same supposedly happened with atoms and crystals. He was also a racist who ranked “the various types of humanity” according to their relative “worth,” horrifyingly describing the “wool-haired” people, whom Haeckel saw as the lowest-value group, as “incapable of true inner culture and higher intellectual development.”

Haeckel accumulated his ideas, both the intriguing and the odious, throughout his extraordinarily varied career, which began in 1852 with a stint in medical school. While studying at the University of Würzburg, in the Kingdom of Bavaria, his professors highlighted his gift for “recording at astonishing speed precisely what he had seen.” It was noted that Haeckel “was able to look through a microscope with his left eye and at the same time observe the drawing in progress with his right.”

But his tenure as a doctor was brief. He limited his office hours to one hour a day, starting at 5 a.m., and saw no more than half a dozen patients. Haeckel turned his attention to marine biology and, in 1862, published a beautifully illustrated monograph on radiolarians. These single-celled protists (most less than a millimeter in diameter) absorb silica from seawater, forming ‘skeletons’ with “interlocking spirals, spherical lattices, and tiny pyramids with radiating struts.” His later publications included atlases and monographs on sponges, corals, and jellyfish.

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Over the course of his 85 years of life, Haeckel identified thousands of species, including two he named after “my unforgettable and beloved wife, Anna Sethe,” who died of a ruptured appendix in 1864, 18 months after they married. The grieving widower fled to Nice, on France’s Cote d’Azur, where he came across a jellyfish lying in a puddle left by the ebbing tide. Its delicate yellow tentacles reminded him of his late wife’s blonde hair, which is why he called it mitrocomae annas (‘Anna’s diadem’). The second species named after Anna was Desmonema annasthe — another jellyfish, which Haeckel considered even more beautiful.

“Try to imagine the elegant, slender stem of a flower, its leaves and colorful buds as transparent as glass,” Haeckel wrote to his parents of Siphonophorae in 1867. Some of his sketches were recreated in glass. When Prince Albert I of Monaco opened a museum at the Oceanographic Institute in 1910, a ceiling lamp was inspired by Haeckel’s drawings of jellyfish.

Likewise, a chandelier designed by Dutch architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange was based on Haeckel’s drawing of Rhopilema fridaa jellyfish named after his muse and lover Frida von Uslar-Gleichen (with whom he exchanged more than 900 love letters during his second, unhappy marriage to Agnes Huschke).