Art-Forms in Nature

Here are a few images from Ernst Haeckel's portfolio Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904), an outstandingly beautiful album of plates emphasising the seemingly artful elegance of natural forms.

Haeckel achieved great fame in his day as a populariser of Darwin's theories. He was, moreover, one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology, and also proposed many now ubiquitous coinages such as phylum and ecology.

On the other hand, most of Haeckel's speculative theories were later discredited. Worse, he was a fraud and a racist. Even so, it is surely going too far to say, as at least one creationist site has it, that ‘Haeckel provided the malign influence and pernicious inspiration that were the indirect cause of two world wars and the atrocities of the holocaust.'

The present images are all taken from Kurt St�ber's site (full Kunstformen index here). I first arrived at this link by way of logodrome.