The Origins of the World. The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century.

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Until the rise of natural sciences in Europe in the 19th century, the world was a garden, the earthly paradise shaped in the image of the divine.

The great voyages of exploration, from Humboldt to Darwin's journey, and the first treatises on zoology revealed the diversity of the world and made it possible to identify new living species. Alongside the books by Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), the study of anthropological varieties and the advancement of palaeoanthropology shook people's consciences. What are the origins of man, his place in Nature, his links with animals and his own animality in a world now understood as an ecosystem?

A plural exhibition, between science and the arts

The discovery of the antiquity of life, of the age of the earth, of prehistoric humans… influence even artists who reinterpret nature from the largest to the infinitely small. The Symbolist aesthetics of metamorphosis was then populated by monsters and hybrids, while Art Nouveau and Symbolism testify to a fascination for the origins of life.

At a time when the survival of many species is threatened, the exhibition at themusée d'Orsay, at the crossroads of science and art, makes perfect sense.