Byzantine Pottery

Extract

One of the more complicated problems that confronts the art student to-day is that of maintaining touch with all the material relative to the sphere of his own researches that is published in numerous periodicals. For this reason a short note, referring to a recent article in Ars Islamica (Michigan, 1938, Vol. V, Pt. I, pp. 55–86) may be of service to Byzantinists. In the article, which is entitled ‘ Mediaeval Graves in Cyprus ’ and is by Miss du Plat Taylor, associated curator of the Nicosia Museum, a quantity of late Byzantine pottery is published. Excellent outline drawings and photographs are given, and our familiarity with these later polychrome sgraffito wares, common over the whole Mediterranean world, is considerably widened. Most important, the vessels come from graves, where they were in many cases found in association with coins. They can thus be definitely dated to quarter centuries or even to decades during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Miss Taylor is to be congratulated on her excavations and on this full publication of them.