Friday Links: museum cats, card-playing dogs, giant presidential heads

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 small Dutch city where Hieronymus Bosch was born is celebrating his 500th birthday with angels, demons, mermaids, and monsters in the streets. And that’s just for starters.
• The back story to the making of the American Museum of Natural History’s wildlife dioramas is as interesting as the dioramas themselves. (And don’t forget that we wrote about the dioramas’ appearance in The Catcher in the Rye.)
• Cats play an important role at the St. Petersburg Museum. They also played an important role in catching a pair of otherwise convincing art forgers.
• Lest you peg us as being obsessed with cats, here’s a story decoding the secret Freemason symbolism of Dogs Playing Poker (demolishing our theory about the illuminati).

• While we enjoyed learning how 43 giant, crumbling presidential heads ended up in a field in Virginia, we loved the photos even more.
• Rhizome just launched a 3-D modeling and printing project that resurrects a Roman-era sculpture in Iraq’s Mosul Museum allegedly destroyed by ISIS last February.
• There’s more to being a doctor than diagnosing symptoms. And that’s where art comes in. (Bonus: Learn how Art History instructor Gloria Mast uses Artstor to teach nurses.)
• Archivists can finally rest easy with the introduction of a digital data storage technique that uses laser light to store 360 terabytes of information for up to 14 billion years.