The Haeckel Room

Between 1899 and 1904 Ernst Haeckel published Kunstformen der Natur— a hundred plates of radiolarians, medusae, ciliates and algae, drawn from his own microscope work and printed at a quality that changed what people thought the invisible world looked like. Four of those plates are in this room, at full resolution. Zoom in as far as you like.

About the man who drew these

Haeckel produced the most beautiful scientific illustration of his century. He also idealised his subjects past what he observed — completing broken skeletons, regularising asymmetries, arranging specimens into symmetries the specimens did not have. The plates are evidence and they are also an argument, and he did not always mark which was which.

He was, further, the century's most effective populariser of recapitulation theory, and he wrote explicit racial hierarchies into his work on human origins — material later taken up by people whose purposes he did not live to see. That is not incidental to his science; it came out of the same conviction that nature is orderly and that the order ranks things.

We show the plates because they are extraordinary and because they are public domain, which is the only reason a museum with no budget can hang them. Showing them without saying this would be a different kind of idealisation.

Ciliata
Wimperlinge — the ciliates
Plate 3
Look for the trumpets.

Haeckel’s ciliate plate is arranged the way all his plates are — radially, in tiers, with the largest specimen given the centre and the rest disposed around it in a symmetry that the pond never actually offered him. It is a composition, not a survey.

And yet the shapes are right. The stalked bells, the long contractile ribbons, the funnel-mouthed feeders anchored by the tail: these are creatures four of our portraits are also of, seen through a lens perhaps a tenth as good as a phone camera, and drawn by hand well enough that you can tell what they are.
Beside it, alive
Half this zoo's cast are ciliates, and this is their plate. We are not claiming that any particular figure here IS one of our animals — Haeckel composited and idealised, and matching a drawn figure to a species is often genuinely unanswerable. What the pairing claims is narrower and safer: these are the same kind of creature, drawn from the same water, a century before anyone could film one.
Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (1899–1904). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 2314 × 3276.
Open the full-resolution plate (2314 × 3276)
Mycetozoa
Schleimpilze — the slime moulds
Plate 92
Haeckel drew what would sit still for him.

Slime moulds spend most of their existence as a formless creeping sheet, and no amount of drawing skill captures that on paper. So the plate shows the endings: delicate stalked capsules, each one the point at which a slime mould stopped being a wanderer and turned itself into spores.

The animal in our Cast is the same organism in the state Haeckel had no way to represent. He got the beautiful half. We got the half that moves.
Beside it, alive
- Physarum
The slime mould plate. Haeckel drew the fruiting bodies — the stalked, spore-bearing structures a slime mould makes at the end of its life — because they hold still. The portrait in the Cast shows the other half he could not have filmed: the plasmodium, moving. Neither is complete without the other, which is the honest pairing here.
Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (1899–1904). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 2332 × 3271.
Open the full-resolution plate (2332 × 3271)
Discoidea
Scheiben-Strahlinge — the disc radiolarians
Plate 21
This is the material Haeckel is famous for, and the material the accusation is about.

Radiolarian skeletons really are radially symmetric, really are geometric, and really do look manufactured. Haeckel then drew them more so — tidying the irregularities, completing what was broken, arranging specimens on the page into symmetries the specimens themselves did not have. The plates are simultaneously some of the most accurate scientific illustration of the nineteenth century and a sustained argument that nature is more orderly than it is.

Put one beside a living heliozoan and you can see both things at once: how right he was about the form, and how much he pressed it.
Beside it, alive
- Heliozoa
Radiolarians, not heliozoans — a different group with a similar answer. Both build radial mineral architecture and both look impossible. The pairing is about the form, not the family, which is fitting given that "heliozoan" is itself a shape rather than a lineage.
Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (1899–1904). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 2304 × 3284.
Open the full-resolution plate (2304 × 3284)
Melethallia
Gesellige Algetten — the colonial algae
Plate 34
The plate is about a question rather than a creature.

What Haeckel gathered here are algae that have stopped being single cells without quite becoming organisms — flat sheets, rings, stars, plates of cells living together in a fixed arrangement, each one a different guess at how much of your independence you should give up to be part of something.

Volvox, in the Cast next door, is the guess that went furthest: a sphere whose swimming cells cannot reproduce at all. Whether it is on this page we do not claim. The argument is.
Beside it, alive
- Volvox
The colonial-algae plate — organisms that solved, in various ways, the problem of being several cells at once. We are NOT claiming that Volvox itself appears among these figures; that has not been verified and Haeckel's plate titles do not map cleanly onto modern groups. The pairing is thematic: this is the page where the question our Volvox portrait is about gets asked in ink.
Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (1899–1904). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 2360 × 3335.
Open the full-resolution plate (2360 × 3335)

Ciliata

Mycetozoa

Discoidea

Melethallia