The Art of Biodiversity

A$60 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

An illuminating survey of the golden age of natural history art and illustration, with profiles of the artists, naturalists, collectors, and publishers who helped form our modern scientific view of the world The Art of Biodiversity is the first book to offer a broad overview of the golden age of natural history and botanical art-an art of biodiversity. For two centuries, artists and naturalists worked together to reveal animals and plants with the same care that art had always lavished on human subjects. In 30 chapters, The Art of Biodiversity explores the individuals and ideas behind this international movement. It includes hundreds of full-page color illustrations illuminated by in-depth captions. 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. Around 1700, Europeans set out to document the natural world in its dazzling and confounding glory. At the beginning of this period, people everywhere relied on folkloric knowledge about local flora and fauna to satisfy human needs or tell religious stories. By the end of the 19th century, a vista encompassing millions of species over millions of years had been revealed-an organic universe shaped by evolution. The idea that each plant and animal was, in the words of the poet and naturalist Johann Wolfgang vonGoethe, "a small world that exists for itself," had taken root. Before photography and film became practical mediums in the 20th century, the rapidly

• Binding: Hardcover

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