Friday Links: artists’ graves and the elephant beneath the Vatican

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:

• Sounds like the beginning of a joke: Why is there an elephant buried underneath the Vatican? It’s not a joke, though.
• We don’t mean to get all BuzzFeed on you, but these ancient, tiny fragments of glass will blow your mind. (You can also read what we wrote on
• What the heck, we’ll keep going. A secret object hidden in a Fabergé egg was discovered in the British royal family’s collection, and you won’t believe what it is. (We wrote on the other things that Fabergé made aside from Easter eggs.)
• Rembrandt drew nearly 100 sketches of his own face. Now they’re in a textbook — for plastic surgeons.
• We’re strangely addicted to this Tumblr dedicated to bad museum reviews on Yelp.
• Here is a line of poseable action figures based on the world’s greatest sculptures. Be sure to click on the Venus de Milo to see what she looked like before she lost her arms.

• And on more serious Greek news, archaeologists discovered the rich grave of a warrior who was buried at the dawn of European civilization, and their findings offer the potential for shedding light on the lost world of the heroes described in the epics of Homer.

And we haven’t forgotten that tomorrow is Halloween:

• Here’s a handy guide to the 19th-century artists’ graves of New York City.
• Edward Gorey designed a set of whimsical tarot cards called the Fantod Pack. As befits this cranky artist of gloom, the word fantod means “a state of worry or nervous anxiety, irritability.”
• Enjoy this beautiful set of promotional posters for Harry Kellar, an American magician of the late 19th and early 20th century. The decapitation ones are our favorites, though the one in which he’s toasting with the devil is also nice.
• And since we mentioned BuzzFeed above, it’s only fair to include them. Here is their list of “17 brilliant art history-inspired halloween costumes.”