Ernst Haeckel was a German zoologist who spent his life looking down microscopes, and what he saw there was pure psychedelia. Between 1899 and 1904 he published Kunstformen der Natur — "Art Forms in Nature" — a hundred plates of radiolarians, jellyfish, sea anemones, diatoms and other organisms, drawn with obsessive symmetry and ornament.

Many of the creatures are tiny, single-celled marine plankton whose glassy skeletons form geodesic domes, spikes and lattices. Haeckel drew them like crown jewels. He was a scientist, but he was also making an argument: that nature itself is an artist.

The plate shown here is of jellyfish, Discomedusae. The large one, Desmonema annasethe, Haeckel named after his first wife, Anna Sethe, who had died shortly before he first observed it; its trailing tentacles are often read as a portrait of her flowing hair.

The plates hit the art world hard. Art Nouveau designers borrowed his forms, and the monumental gateway of the 1900 Paris Exposition by architect René Binet was inspired by Haeckel's radiolarians.

A word of caution: Haeckel was a brilliant illustrator but not always a careful one, and some of his drawings — and some of his scientific ideas — were idealised or wrong. Enjoy them as what they are: one of the most beautiful books ever made about real creatures that most people will never see.