Friday Links: texters vs. sculpture, bathing vs. linen, and more

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:

• A giant sculpture in the UK had to be moved to avoid collisions with people texting.
• “What seems certain is that this final, extraordinary painting by Francis Bacon, unseen and undocumented until now, is by an artist who knows he will soon die.”
• A historian attempts to follow Tudor hygiene, changing her linen underwear in lieu of bathing to surprising results.
• Maybe it’s art, maybe it’s not: the creepiest channel on YouTube.
• In the thirties, Alice Neel made a series of illustrations for an edition of The Brothers Karamazov that never made it to print. Too bad, because they look great.
• The Buddhist Kamakura statues are miracles of technique, carved of wood hollowed out so thin that the sculptures weigh almost nothing.

• The Aberdeen Bestiary is a stunningly beautiful 12th-century English illuminated manuscript. Now you can virtually leaf through it yourself.
• Robert James Campbell died homeless and forgotten, but he left a box of photographs of movers and shakers that inspired someone to dedicate thirteen years of her life to trace his.
• Two German artists clandestinely scanned the head of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum Berlin and have released the 3D data under a Creative Commons License.
• Who painted the enigmatic Giustiniani Portrait? The Royal Academy will ask the public to vote whether Giorgione or Titian created the masterpiece.