The Origins of the World

About The Origins of the World

"The Origins of the World. The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century" is an exhibition organised by the Orsay and Orangerie museums and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in partnership with the National Museum of Natural History.
The exhibition brings together the arts and science in a highly-original way. From the late 18th century to the early 20th century, scientific progress changed not just Man’s vision of nature, but also of himself. Biology, zoology, geology and palaeontology were all fields specialising in and changing the global vision of the world as it had been seen by Renaissance scholars, uomo universale, or universal man. Both the biblical creation story and the true age of the earth were put into question by the discoveries made by the first geologists, and also by the fundamental work of the naturalist Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species, which set out a new theory of the evolution of living things. Man’s image and his relationship with nature were shaken by this progress and artists reflected these changes on both a literal and metaphorical level. The exhibition chronologically and thematically retraces this complex story in which paintings, sculpture, and drawings enter into a dialogue with scientific works and objects.