Colour from the Deep: Gustav von Hayek and the Zoological Atlases of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the great natural history atlases of Europe were among the most ambitious publishing projects of the age. They were encyclopaedias of the visible world — systematic, exhaustive, and extraordinarily beautiful — produced at a moment when the scientific impulse to classify and document all living things coincided with the chromolithographic technology to render them in full colour for the first time. To open one of these atlases is to enter a world in which science and art had not yet been separated, in which the accurate depiction of a fish’s scales was both a contribution to knowledge and an act of aesthetic devotion.

Gustav von Hayek’s plates for the Wielki atlas do zoologii, botaniki i mineralogii — the Grand Atlas of Zoology, Botany, and Mineralogy, published in 1887 — belong to this tradition at its finest.

Gustav von Hayek: Naturalist of the Empire

Gustav von Hayek (1836–1911) was an Austrian zoologist and naturalist whose career unfolded in the intellectual and institutional world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — one of the great centres of natural history research in nineteenth-century Europe. Vienna’s imperial collections, its university, and its network of scientific societies provided the infrastructure for a generation of naturalists who documented the biodiversity of the empire and the wider world with systematic rigour.

Hayek worked across multiple branches of zoology, contributing to the encyclopaedic projects that were the characteristic scientific achievement of the Victorian era. His illustrations combined the precision of a trained scientist with the visual sensibility of an artist — a combination that the chromolithographic atlas demanded above all others. To illustrate a fish for a scientific atlas was not merely to draw it: it was to capture its anatomy, its coloration, its characteristic posture, in a form that would allow a reader to identify it with certainty.

The Wielki Atlas: An Encyclopaedic Ambition

The Wielki atlas do zoologii, botaniki i mineralogii — published in 1887 and intended for a broad educated readership across Central Europe — was one of the most comprehensive natural history atlases of its era. Its scope was extraordinary: zoology, botany, and mineralogy in a single volume, illustrated with chromolithographic plates of exceptional quality, designed to serve both as a scientific reference and as an introduction to the natural world for students, teachers, and curious readers.

The atlas reflected the encyclopaedic ambition of the Austro-Hungarian intellectual tradition — the belief that knowledge could be systematised, illustrated, and made accessible to all. It was a product of the same culture that produced the great imperial museums of Vienna, the botanical gardens of Budapest, and the natural history collections that drew scientists from across Europe. In its pages, the diversity of life on earth was rendered visible, plate by plate, in the vivid colours that only chromolithography could achieve.

The Fish Plates: Precision and Chromatic Mastery

Among the most striking plates in the atlas are those devoted to fish — Plates 044 and 045, which appear on the cover of our journal. They present a remarkable diversity of species: freshwater and marine, tropical and temperate, familiar and exotic. Each fish is rendered with meticulous attention to anatomy — the precise arrangement of fins, the structure of scales, the characteristic proportions of each species — and with a chromatic richness that captures the extraordinary variety of colour in aquatic life.

The chromolithographic process — printing in multiple layers of colour from separate lithographic stones — was ideally suited to the challenge of illustrating fish. The iridescence of scales, the gradations of colour along a flank, the vivid markings that distinguish one species from another: all of these could be rendered with a fidelity that no earlier printing technique could match. Hayek’s plates exploit the full potential of the medium, producing images that are at once scientifically accurate and visually arresting.

To look at these plates is to understand why the great natural history atlases of the nineteenth century were treasured not only by scientists but by collectors, educators, and lovers of beautiful books. They are documents of a moment when the observation of nature was inseparable from its celebration.

The Austro-Hungarian Tradition of Natural History

The Wielki atlas was a product of a specific scientific and cultural tradition — the natural history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — that deserves to be better known. Vienna was one of the great centres of nineteenth-century science: home to the Naturhistorisches Museum, one of the largest natural history collections in the world; to the Imperial Botanical Gardens; to a university with a distinguished tradition of zoological and botanical research.

The empire’s extraordinary geographical and biological diversity — from the Alpine meadows of Austria to the Adriatic coast, from the Pannonian plain to the Carpathian forests — gave its naturalists an unusually rich field of study. And the imperial tradition of patronage and collection meant that the resources to document this diversity — in expeditions, in museums, in atlases — were available to a degree that few other European states could match.

Hayek’s work belongs to this tradition: systematic, rigorous, and animated by the conviction that the careful observation and illustration of the natural world was among the most important things a scientist could do.

From Scientific Atlas to Object of Wonder

The great zoological atlases of the nineteenth century were designed to be used — consulted, studied, carried into the field. But they have become, over the century and a half since their publication, objects of a different kind of wonder: treasured for their beauty as much as their scientific content, collected by those who find in their plates a vision of the natural world that no digital image can quite replicate.

There is something irreplaceable about a chromolithographic fish plate from 1887 — the slight texture of the paper, the depth of the colour, the evidence of the human hand in every line. It is a record not only of the fish it depicts but of the moment in which it was made: a moment when science and art, observation and beauty, were still understood to be the same endeavour.

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Gustav von Hayek’s fish plates from the Wielki atlas (1887) — Plates 044 and 045 — appear on the cover of our Gustav von Hayek Fish Journal — Zoological Atlas 1887, a hardcover journal with casewrap sewn binding and matte laminated full-wrap cover.

References

• Von Hayek, Gustav. Wielki atlas do zoologii, botaniki i mineralogii. 1887. Plates 044–045.
• Nissen, Claus. Die zoologische Buchillustration: ihre Bibliographie und Geschichte. Hiersemann, 1969–1978.
• Lack, H. Walter. Garden Eden: Masterpieces of Botanical Illustration. Taschen, 2008.
• Blunt, Wilfrid, and William T. Stearn. The Art of Botanical Illustration. Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994.
• Olby, Robert, et al., eds. Companion to the History of Modern Science. Routledge, 1990.