Darwin and the arts.(CURRENT and coming)(Endless forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts)

The greatly anticipated exhibition "Endless forms": Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts will open at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven on February 12. A highlight of the global celebration of the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the show brings together a fascinating range of paintings, drawings, warercolors, prints, photographs, and sculptures from major American and European collections that shed light on the myriad ways in which Darwin's revolutionary theories inspired late nineteenth-century artists, from the British photographer William Henry Fox Talbot to the American painter Martin Johnson Heade.

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To reveal these interactions, the exhibition's curators have cleverly juxtaposed fine art with a range of scientific materials--from geological maps and botanical teaching diagrams to fossils, minerals, and ornithological specimens. A section of the exhibition called "Darwin, Beauty, and Sexual Selection" highlights the scientist's notions of beauty in nature, specifically as it relates to courtship displays among birds. By showing paintings by James Tissot, Frederick Sandys, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti with feathered fashion accessories and brilliantly colored ornithological specimens, the curators illuminate the parallels that Darwin himself drew between the display of beautiful, sexually alluring features by birds and by humans (female mate choice was one of the most controversial aspects of Darwin's principles of sexual ...