It is always strange who history choses to remember and who to sideline and possibly forget. So it is with Ernst Haeckel who, outside of small circles of those with an interest in art and science, is relativley unknown, at least when compared to his friend and contemporary, Charles Darwin. So, here is a look at his work, in particular his huge turn of the nineteenth century undertaking Art Forms of Nature. Quite stupendous.

From the article:

Haeckel produced illustrations that people could take in and understand, images that glowed with color and brought the exotic and remote in to the libraries of the world. Really, there had not been anything like these extraordinary prints before. They were the culmination of decades of works for Haeckel, a contemporary of Darwin and he did much to popularize the work of the English naturalist although their ideas did diverge at several important points, as we shall later discover.

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