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 growing visual record of species was created collaboratively by naturalists and artists, working with adventurers, specimen collectors, printers, colorists, and publishers. The Art of Biodiversity introduces the reader to these extraordinary men and women who focused exquisite artistic skills on nature, traded in exotic seashells and butterflies, collected bird and monkey specimens in neotropical rainforests, dredged strange invertebrates from the depths of the ocean, peered through magnifying lenses at insects, dug prehistoric bones out of the earth.

This innovative book is a journey to the past, but it’s also a reflection of the present day. As recently as a decade ago, old volumes were locked away in research libraries. But In 2007, the online Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) was founded with the ambition to hold a copy of every public domain book and journal ever published on biology. Caught in the nets of this haul are the great illustrated natural history books, and today there are more than 300,000 exquisite pictures of nature in the BHL. The best of them are gathered here in book form for the first time, expertly selected by Eric Himmel and accompanied by insightful commentary and explanatory captions. Art and science converge in thrilling fashion in this richly illustrated and groundbreaking book.