Kunstformen der Natur

date: 1899-01-01

A plate from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), the German naturalist’s magnum opus of biological illustration. Haeckel’s plates — symmetrical, ornamental, drawn with the precision of a scientific draughtsman and the eye of an Art Nouveau designer — set the standard for the marriage of science and ornament in the early twentieth century.

The Codex takes from Haeckel not only a visual idiom but an editorial one: the conviction that the natural world is itself decorative, that the careful drawing of an organism can be both documentation and ornament. The site’s engraved silhouettes, ornamental dividers, and pull-quote motifs are Haeckel’s children.