GoKawiilThe Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel Julia Voss & Rainer Willmann Taschen (2026)
To immerse yourself in the world of naturalist Ernst Haeckel is to fall into a kaleidoscope of vibrant sea slugs, coiling octopuses, looping larvae and bulbous bodies. These tantalizing creatures float and wriggle before your eyes, mesmerizing in their curious contortion.
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The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel brings together 450 detailed drawings, watercolours and sketches created by this nineteenth-century German polymath. Inside its pages, umbrella-shaped medusae, or jellyfish, trail their tentacles like ethereal bridal veils. Spiky radiolarians — microscopic zooplankton found throughout the ocean — take strange forms, calling to mind beehives and Buddhist temples. Nudibranchs, a group of sea slugs, sprout fronds 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 physician. Among other achievements, he was known for defending Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in an 1863 lecture in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland).
His ideas ranged from eccentric to eugenic. He thought that the simplest unicellular organisms possess an early form of the soul — the same was supposedly true for atoms and crystals. He was also a racist who ranked “the diverse types of mankind” according to their relative “value”, horrifyingly describing “woolly haired” people, whom Haeckel saw as the lowest-value group, as “incapable of a true inner culture and a higher intellectual development”.
Ernst Haeckel categorized and depicted thousands of species.Credit: TASCHEN Cologne/Göttingen State and University Library
Haeckel accumulated his ideas, both the intriguing and the odious, over the course of his extraordinarily varied career, which began in 1852 with a stint at medical school. While he was a student at the University of Würzburg in the Kingdom of Bavaria, his professors remarked on his gift for “recording at astounding speed precisely what he had seen”. One noted that Haeckel “was able to look through a microscope with his left eye while simultaneously attending to the drawing in progress with his right”.
But his tenure as a physician was brief. He confined his office hours to one hour a day, starting at 5 a.m., and took on no more than half a dozen patients ever. Haeckel switched his focus to marine biology and, in 1862, published a beautifully illustrated monograph on the radiolarians. These single-celled protists (most less than one millimetre in diameter) absorb silica from seawater, forming ‘skeletons’ with “interlacing spirals, spherical lattices, and minute pyramids with radiating struts”. His later publications included atlases and monographs on sponges, corals and jellyfish.
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