The Art of Biodiversity

Strikingly original and abundantly illustrated, The Art of Biodiversity surveys the golden age of natural history art, exploring the alliance between scientists and artists that first revealed the astonishing diversity of life on Earth.

With more than 330 color illustrations of surpassing beauty, this book reveals a story about art that's not in the art history books, and a story about science that's missing from histories of science. Here, such giants as Linnaeus, Buffon, Cuvier, Humboldt, and Darwin cross paths with superb artists, including Merian, Redouté, Audubon, and Haeckel, among many others.

An essential visual companion to popular narratives like Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature and Jason Roberts's Every Living Thing, this volume provides a definitive archival record of the era that defined modern biology.

Between 1700 and 1900, an art movement unveiled nature's great secret: the global diversity of life-forms. Centuries before the word "biodiversity" existed, naturalists began to glimpse the reality that lay behind Charles Darwin's lyrical evocation of nature's "endless forms most beautiful."

The naturalists recruited artists to create a family album of Earth, with every picture a precise drawing of a species of plant or animal, and so science and art, for the first and last time, went exploring together.