Friday Links: Mona Lisa, King Tut, and Star Wars
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:
- Another week, another Mona Lisa story. Well, this week it’s literally another Mona Lisa.
- Five heart-shaped lead boxes from the 16th and 17th centuries were exhumed from the basement of a convent in France. What was in them? One guess.
- Good news! King Tut’s beard, which had been ineptly glued-on with epoxy, has been successfully repaired. Bonus: the materials used to fix it were what “the ancient Egyptian used.”
- Most pictures didn’t have titles before the 18th century. What changed?
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art is inaugurating its new branch (AKA “The Met Breuer”) with an ingenuous concept: unfinished artworks.
- What does the new Star Wars movie have to do with art? We’ll let the Huntington Library answer that. And while we’re at it, here are some interesting remakes of the series’ earlier installments.