Science

Art about scientific discovery and its tools: anatomy, experiments, microscopes, specimens, laboratories and genetics.

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About

Science and art have long shared habits: close looking, careful record and the urge to explain. Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632) turns a public dissection into a group portrait, and Joseph Wright of Derby's An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) lights a travelling lecturer's demonstration by a single candle, the onlookers' faces showing wonder and dread. The engraved flea in Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665) showed readers what the microscope could reveal.

Scientists made striking images themselves. Anna Atkins's cyanotype book of British algae, begun in 1843, is counted among the first books illustrated with photographs, and Santiago Ramón y Cajal's ink drawings of nerve cells from around 1900 are still reproduced. Berenice Abbott photographed physics experiments in the late 1950s for a school textbook. More recently Eduardo Kac has worked with genetics, commissioning GFP Bunny (2000), a rabbit engineered to glow green.