Items22The creator’s order
  1. 1Leonardo da VinciLeonardo da VinciBorn 15 Apr 1452Leonardo da Vinci was celebrated in his lifetime as the painter of The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, while his scientific work stayed private in thousands of notebook pages: anatomical drawings from dissections, studies of water flow, optics and flight. Those notebooks were scattered and largely…0i
  2. 2Robert HookeRobert HookeRobert Hooke was the Royal Society's curator of experiments and gave us Hooke's law of elasticity, but his best-known book, Micrographia (1665), is also a work of art: large engraved drawings of a flea, a fly's eye and cork cells, a word he coined. He had trained briefly with a portrait painter.…0i
  3. 3Maria Sibylla MerianMaria Sibylla MerianBorn 2 Apr 1647Maria Sibylla Merian trained as a flower painter and engraver in Frankfurt and paid for her own research trip to Suriname in 1699 with her daughter. Her Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname (1705) showed insects through their life cycles on their food plants, evidence against the idea that…0i
  4. 4Johann Wolfgang von GoetheJohann Wolfgang von GoetheBorn 28 Aug 1749Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, author of Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther, considered his scientific work as important as his poetry. He identified the intermaxillary bone in humans, wrote The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and a long Theory of Colours (1810) that opposed Newton. Physicists…0i
  5. 5Samuel MorseSamuel MorseBorn 27 Apr 1791Samuel Morse was a respected portrait and history painter, a founder and first president of the National Academy of Design in New York, before he turned to electrical telegraphy in the 1830s. His telegraph line and code, demonstrated between Washington and Baltimore in 1844, made him famous and…0i
  6. 6Anna AtkinsAnna AtkinsBorn 16 Mar 1799Anna Atkins was a botanist who used the new cyanotype process, invented by her friend John Herschel, to make Photographs of British Algae, issued from 1843 and often called the first book illustrated with photographs. Each blue-and-white print was made by laying a seaweed specimen directly on…0i
  7. 7Alexander BorodinAlexander BorodinBorn 12 Nov 1833Alexander Borodin was a research chemist and professor in St Petersburg, with work on aldehydes and a reaction named after him, and also a member of the group of Russian composers known as The Five. His Second Symphony, string quartets and the opera Prince Igor are concert-hall staples. Chemists…0i
  8. 8Ernst HaeckelErnst HaeckelBorn 16 Feb 1834Ernst Haeckel, a zoologist who described thousands of marine species and coined the word ecology, was also a gifted illustrator. His Art Forms in Nature (1904), with plates of radiolarians, jellyfish and sea anemones, influenced Art Nouveau design. His science has a darker side: his embryo drawings…0i
  9. 9Santiago Ramón y CajalSantiago Ramón y CajalBorn 1 May 1852Santiago Ramón y Cajal wanted to be a painter as a boy, but his father pushed him into medicine. He shared the 1906 Nobel prize for showing that the nervous system is made of separate cells, neurons, and he made his case through thousands of detailed ink drawings of brain tissue. Those drawings,…0i
  10. 10Beatrix PotterBeatrix PotterBorn 28 Jul 1866Beatrix Potter made hundreds of accurate watercolours of fungi and studied how their spores germinate; her paper on the subject was read at the Linnean Society in 1897 by a male colleague, because women could not attend. Frustrated by the scientific establishment, she turned to children's books,…0i