During the pandemic the French-German TV channel arte reached out to me because they were doing a segment about art and science and they were particularly interested in the work of Ernst Haeckel, the German naturalist, biologist and artist from the 19th century, who is well known for his beautiful illustrations of organisms, especially marine life which he published in works like Art Forms in Nature. Haeckel’s illustrations have been an early inspiration for me: as a child, I would often browse through my parents’ encyclopedias (Meyers Konversations-Lexikon from around 1900), which had various illustrations by Haeckel and other illustrators. I was fascinated by the beauty of the exotic creatures and it was something that set me on the path to later become a biologist and scientific illustrator.
Interestingly, Haeckel was sometimes criticised for prioritizing aesthetics over scientific precision. He was said to take too much artistic license that makes his depicted animals and plants more beautiful than they really are. His desire to create visually balanced and harmonious images led him to exaggerate symmetry in organisms, even when such symmetry did not naturally exist. This is an interesting dilemma that all scientific illustrators face, how to strike the right balance between aesthetics and scientific accuracy. Indeed, I too have been criticised for my illustration of deadly viruses being “too beautiful” 🙂
