When it comes to that distinctly human sensation we call awe, little can rival the complexity of our own brains to elicit it. Indeed, so staggering are the numbers— current estimates have it that each contains 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections between them—that the organ seems to founder before its own immensity. No less astonishing, though fortunately more comprehensible, are its structures—the cells’ elaborate shapes and the byzantine networks by which they communicate— and this is exactly what we get to see in the exquisite drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Somewhat improbably, in the thick of a political climate that has both art and science under threat of irrelevance, something of a renaissance seems to be happening at their intersection.