uwmspeccoll:Decorative Sunday Published in 1984 in a two volume, four part set (with part 2 of
uwmspeccoll:Decorative Sunday Published in 1984 in a two volume, four part set (with part 2 of each volume containing plates) by the University of Chicago Press for Dumbarton Oaks, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice documents the career-culminating project of Byzantine art historian, Otto Demus. The plates presented here are from the first volume, which comprises mosaics from the eleventh and twelfth centuries; the second volume deals with those from the thirteenth century.Demus first published on Basilica di San Marco early in his career: Die Mosaiken von San Marco in Venedig, 1100-1300 (Baden bei Wien: R. M. Rohrer Verlag, 1935). That text was an abridged version of Demus’s 1927 doctoral thesis. Early in his career, Demus noted a neglect of scholarship on San Marco despite being the one of the most expansive extant examples of medieval mosaic work. In his introduction to The Mosaics of San Marco, he attributes this oversight to “the fact that medieval Venice constitutes a kind of art-historical no-man’s-land, belonging neither to Byzantium nor to the West.”Between 1949 and 1980, Demus was also a regular visiting scholar at the Dumbarton Oaks research library. In 1973, Demus secured funding from Dumbarton Oaks to fully document and clean the San Marco mosaics in preparation for this publication. The scholar, by then in his seventies, was an enthusiastic participant in the project, scaling the scaffolding each day over the five year duration of the project. View more Decorative Sunday posts here. -Olivia, Special Collections Graduate Intern -- source link