In 1887, Ernst Haeckel looked through a microscope at the ocean and found geometry so perfect it could only be described as art. He spent the rest of his life trying to prove it.
This puzzle is drawn directly from Haeckel’s Synopsis Radiolariorum et Heliozoorum, Vol. I — the same scientific plates that inspired the trinket pot in The Haeckel Archive series, here expanded to their full compositional ambition. At the centre, Acanthometra radiata floats against a ground of deep stellar blue, its latticed sphere radiating outward in perfect symmetry. Around it, the peripheral hexagonal tiles carry the supporting specimens — each annotated in the original Latin of the plate: Tab. XXVIII, Fig. II, Fig. IV — spined, spherical, crystalline forms that look less like living organisms and more like the blueprints of a universe.
Assembled, it becomes a scientific plate. Disassembled, it is a cabinet of microscopic wonders. In either state, it is an object that rewards attention.
The Object
Fired in ceramic and presented in a handsome hexagonal wooden box lined with ivory linen, this is a puzzle conceived as a collectible — something to be displayed as readily as it is solved.
