Micrarium gallery in London’s Grant Museum of Zoology
The museum’s new Micrarium gallery was converted from an office, creating a space just big enough to hold one or two visitors at a time. The slides line the brilliantly backlit walls, showcasing their endless delicate forms and jewel-like colours, which usually come from the stains used in their preparation. The effect is individually fascinating and collectively dazzling - like being inside a Gustav Klimt painting.
Specimens range from entire insects and early-stage animal embryos to sections from much larger animals, such as giraffes. Some of the slides are themselves miniature works of art, decorated with graphic designs in Victorian-library colours. Others bear cautionary labels: “LOW POWER ONLY” is the warning to microscopists on several of the more built-up specimens. There’s no explanation provided beyond the original handwritten labels, written in a mixture of Latin and English, so a non-specialist can only guess at what they contain. But the overall point - that the most numerous of the Earth’s biota are tiny and manifold - is well made.