The Art of Biodiversity

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.

The Art of Biodiversity recounts key chapters in the history of scientific nature art. It’s a story about art that’s not in the art history books, and a story about science that’s missing from histories of science. This art appeared in vividly illustrated books that offered readers a vastly expanded vision of nature. The Art of Biodiversity introduces the listener to the extraordinary men and women who created these books.

After sinking out of sight in the twentieth century, biodiversity art resurfaced in the twenty-first in myriad forms that reach millions of people on the Internet. The Art of Biodiversity plots a course through this wealth of material to chronicle the only art movement that successfully aligned the goals of art and science, for the transcendent purpose of documenting and understanding the natural world.