Friday links: Portland style, tell-tale ears, LED Northern Lights

Photographer: Robert Howlett | Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the Great Eastern | ca. 1857-1858 | George Eastman House, eastmanhouse.org

Some stories we’ve been reading this week:

• The Portland Art Museum is giving its artworks a makeover, “Portland Style.”
• Why did Donatello bother to carve a realistic sandal when nobody would be able to see it?
• Archaeologists came up with a novel way to determine whether the warriors in the famous Chinese terracotta army were based on individual people: by looking at their ears.
• And speaking of funerary art, the frescoes of the Santa Priscilla catacombs in Rome bring up a lot of interesting questions.
• A sad sign of the times: Researchers have launched a project to record and map ancient sites in the Middle East before they are destroyed by warfare, looting, and urban expansion.

• An artist is using state-of-the-art LED technology to create an installation that streaks across the nighttime sky like the Northern Lights. We don’t know how convincing it is in real life, but the photos look great.
• This makes us feel hopelessly unaccomplished: Victor Hugo made some four thousand drawings, which he didn’t publish because he feared they would distract from his countless poems, novels, and plays.