Beauty Beyond Belief

Many zoologists came to regard Haeckel as a prolific, successful popularizer and propagandist for his views, but a poor scientist. In The Golden Age of Zoology, the twentieth-century embryologist Richard Goldschmidt, who knew Haeckel late in life, offered a particularly damning assessment, describing Haeckel's early monographs on jellyfish and radiolarians (a kind of single-celled organism) as "actually almost the only factual contributions Haeckel made to zoology."

Goldschmidt, who regarded Haeckel's artistic talent as "a gift and a tendency which were to get him into trouble," provides insights into what might have led Haeckel to produce such apparently misleading representations of the natural world. "Haeckel's easy hand at drawing," Goldschmidt writes, "made him improve upon nature and put more into the illustrations than he saw.... One had the impression that he first made a sketch from nature and then drew an ideal picture as he saw it in his mind." But as the paintings on these pages show, although Haeckel's representations of--and ideas about--nature were sometimes sensational, even suspect, the artistic inspiration he derived from the natural world was the real thing.

An evolutionary biologist fascinated by the relationship between art and science, James Hanken ("Beauty Beyond Belief") was naturally drawn to the works of Ernst Haeckel, an important figure in both areas. Hanken is a professor in the Department of Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he studies the developmental biology of amphibians--especially frogs and salamanders of the New World Tropics--and the evolution of the vertebrate head, the inspiration for his last article in Natural History ("The Art of the Skull," October 1996).

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