The Invention of Nature

Then it was time to leave. Haeckel had arranged to meet the three assistants whom he had hired to help with his research (one scientist from Bonn and two of his students from Jena) in Lisbon from where they sailed to the Canary Islands. Once the four men landed in Tenerife, Haeckel rushed to see the sights that Humboldt had described. And of course he had to follow Humboldt’s footsteps up to the summit of Pico del Teide. As Haeckel climbed through snow and icy winds, he fainted from altitude sickness, and his descent was half stumbling, half falling. But he had made it, he proudly wrote home. That he had seen what Humboldt had seen was ‘highly satisfying’. From Tenerife, he and his three assistants then sailed to the volcanic island of Lanzarote, where they spent three months working on their various zoological projects. Haeckel concentrated on radiolarians and medusae, while his assistants investigated fish, sponges, worms and molluscs. Though the landscape was barren, the sea here was alive, Haeckel said, it was ‘a great animal soup’.

When Haeckel returned to Jena, in April 1867, he was calmer and at peace. Anna would remain the love of his life and even many years later, after he had remarried, the anniversary of her death always made him mournful. ‘On this sad day,’ he wrote thirty-five years later, ‘I am lost.’ But he had learned to accept and live with Anna’s death.

Over the next few decades Haeckel travelled a great deal – mainly within Europe but also to Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, Java and Sumatra. He still taught students at Jena, but he was happiest when travelling. His passion for adventure never disappeared. In 1900, aged sixty-six, he went on an expedition to Java, the mere prospect of which, his friends commented, ‘rejuvenated’ him. During these explorations, he collected specimens but also sketched. Like Humboldt, Haeckel thought that the tropics were the best place to understand the fundamentals of ecology.

A single tree in Java’s rainforest, Haeckel wrote, illustrated the relationships of animals and plants with each other and with their environment in the most striking way: with epiphyte orchids that clung with their roots to the tree’s branches and insects that had become perfectly adapted pollinators or climbers that had won the race for light in the tree’s crown – they were all proof of a diverse ecosystem. Here in the tropics, Haeckel said, the ‘struggle of survival’ was so intense that the weapons that flora and fauna had developed were ‘exceptionally rich’ and varied. This was the place to see how plants and animals lived together with ‘friends and enemies, their symbionts and parasites’, Haeckel wrote. It was Humboldt’s web of life.

During the years in Jena, Haeckel also co-founded a scientific magazine in honour of Humboldt and Darwin. Dedicated to evolutionary theory and ecological ideas, it was called Kosmos. He also wrote and published lavish monographs about sea creatures such as calcareous sponges, jellyfish and more on radiolarians, as well as travel accounts and several books that further popularized Darwin’s theories. Many of Haeckel’s books included his sumptuous illustrations, mostly presented as a series rather than as individual images. For Haeckel these depictions showed the narrative of nature – his compelling way of making evolution ‘visible’. Art had become a tool through which Haeckel conveyed scientific knowledge.

At the turn of the century, Haeckel published a series of booklets called Kunstformen der Natur

(Art Forms in Nature) – taken together it was a collection of one hundred exquisite illustrations that would shape the stylistic language of Art Nouveau. For more than fifty years, Haeckel told a friend, he had followed Humboldt’s ideas but Art Forms in Nature

pushed them even further by introducing scientific subjects to artists and designers. Most of Haeckel’s illustrations revealed the spectacular beauty of tiny organisms that were only visible through the microscope – ‘hidden treasures’, as he wrote. In Art Forms in Nature, Haeckel instructed craftsmen, artists and architects how to use these new ‘beautiful motifs’ correctly by adding an epilogue with tables in which he graded the different organisms according to their aesthetic importance, adding comments such as: ‘extremely rich’, ‘very diverse and meaningful’ or ‘of ornamental design’.

Published between 1899 and 1904, Art Forms in Nature became hugely influential. At a time when urbanization, industrialization and technological advance distanced people from the land, Haeckel’s drawings provided a palette of natural forms and motifs that became a vocabulary for those artists, architects and craftsmen who tried to reunite man and nature through art.