Catalogue of the Sculpture in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection from the Ptolemaic Period to the Renaissance

Dumbarton Oaks
Gary Vikan
ISBN: 0884022129
price: $80.00  

This catalogue includes fifty-two sculptures in the Byzantine Collection at Dumbarton Oaks. It is the fifth volume in an on-going series that will publish the entire collection. The objects range in date from the third-century B.C. miniature portrait head of a Ptolemaic emperor to the sixteenth-century lindenwood "Queen of Heaven" by Tilmann Riemenschneider.
About a quarter of the objects are Greco-Roman in date, and nearly two-thirds of the remainder are Late Antique, the latter predominantly limestone carvings from Early Byzantine Egypt. Another group, mostly fragmentary pieces, came from the Princeton excavations at Antioch in the 1930s, which the founders of Dumbarton Oaks, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, helped to support. Highlights among the early Byzantine sculptures are a porphyry portrait of the Emperor Maximinus Daia, a fragment of a Roman frieze sarcophagus with the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, and a unique, sixth-century relief showing the Aedicula of the Holy Sepulchre. Sculpture of the Middle Byzantine period is very rare, making the four in the collection especially significant; these include a superb standing Virgin, and a large roundel with the portrait of Emperor John II. The remaining nine works are western European, ranging from the pre-Romanesque period to the Renaissance.
These sculptures are not representative of any one culture or period, but they are characteristic of the Blisses' wide-ranging tastes and extraordinary connoisseurship.