1. Incredibly Detailed Illustrations of our favourite small Parisian museums & archives
By artist Christelle Tea wonderful account to follow.
2. These Amazing Quilts
Artist Jeffrey Sincich makes quilts inspired by signage, shop fronts, ephemera. Found via Present & Correct.
3. Traditional 18th Century Welsh Women’s Fashion
Found on Pinterest.
4. This gilded astronomical tool kit from 1557
Compendium, an astronomical tool kit from 1557, containing two different kinds of sundial, a nocturnal and two lunar volvelles to tell time at night, a world map, ten pages engraved with astronomical and astrological tables, seven blank pages, and a magnetic compass.
Found on Reddit.
5. Galileo’s middle finger is on display at the Museo Galileo in Florence
Yup, that’s it.
Feel free to virtually visit the finger (and discover more of this beautiful museum) on the museum website.
6. Mummy Portraits (2000 year old realist paintings)
While ancient Egyptian mummy portraits have long been objects of curiosity, only a minimal amount of scholarship exists about them. Many questions have lingered since they were uncovered by archeologists around the Egyptian city of Fayum in the late 1800s.
In 2003, the conservator Marie Svoboda made it her mission to unravel these mysteries. She’d recently joined the ranks of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and while the institution’s collection was rich and sprawling, a small group of 16 works caught her attention. The detailed, wide-eyed faces in these paintings, known as mummy portraits, date back to 100–250 C.E. Each of them had originally been affixed to a mummy, shrouding the face of the dead.
So Svoboda conceived of an international, multi-institution research project to cull data from a wider corpus of portraits and begin to untangle these questions. She named it APPEAR, or Ancient Panel Paintings: Examination, Analysis, and Research.
Found on Artsy.
7. Daniel Lambert and the Origins of Obesity on Exhibition
Daniel Lambert (1770- 1809), the heaviest authenticated person in history at that time, once fought a bear on the streets of Leicester and only gave up horseback hunting when his weight exceeded 560 pounds. While others have since overtaken Daniel Lambert’s record as the heaviest person in history, he remains a popular character in Leicester, and in 2009 was described by the Leicester Mercury as “one of the city’s most cherished icons”.
Lambert had a special vehicle built to carry him to the big city and took up residence in Piccadilly. Spectators were not only impressed with his size, but they appreciated his intelligence and enjoyed his personality. Visiting him became quite fashionable.
Full article found on Weird Historian.
8. A Zero Waste Restaurant in Estonia
99% recyclable interiors. Found on The Spaces.
9. This portfolio of the latest and greatest in art deco furniture
Book for sale on the Perfume Drinker.
10. A 1930’s blueprint for an erotic device called “The Delightor”.
Sold at Slotin Auctions.
11. A History of Birth Control, From Alligator Dung to The Pill
Found via Open Culture.
12. Joni Mitchell, Meet Edith Wharton
Musician Chase Cohl checked into the Lafayette House early in the pandemic — and never left.
Lafayette House (is) an 1848 brownstone owned by the people behind the Bowery Hotel, for the last two years. It’s not a hotel, exactly — you can’t just rent a room on Expedia. It’s more of a creative community, almost a club, full of artists and musicians who want privacy. It’s a little bit Chateau Marmont, a little bit the old Chelsea Hotel.
Full article found on Curbed.
13. Jimmy’s World
The story of Janet Cooke, a reporter for the Washington Post, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 after she published a story named “Jimmy’s World” about an 8 year old heroin addict. It was later found she fabricated the whole story and later gave back her Pulitzer Prize.
Listen to this fascinating podcast episode here or wherever you get your podcasts.