Byzantine Photographs and Fieldwork Collections

The Byzantine photograph collections include black-and-white prints, color transparencies, slides, and negatives of Byzantine art, architecture, and archaeology from the fourth through the fifteenth century. The emphasis is on materials from Byzantium and neighboring cultures: Italy, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Slovenia, Romania, Russia, Armenia, and Georgia, as well as Greece, Syria, Israel, and Egypt. There is also a limited number of Russian, Crusader, and post-Byzantine works.

The Black & White Photographs are generally arranged by photographic format, medium, country, city, and site. Donations of images by scholars or from various museums and sites are also included in this section. The Site Books are also black and white, but are generally contact prints from the fieldwork of Dumbarton Oaks and the Byzantine Institute of America. The contact prints serve as the visual reference to the negative collection.

In addition, there are approximately 5,000 large-format color transparencies from Dumbarton Oaks fieldwork of mosaics and frescoes from the churches of Greece, Turkey, and Italy. There are 36,000 35mm slides of Byzantine monuments and objects. Monuments are arranged by country and city. Portable arts are organized by medium and then by city and museum collection. Finally, several films were produced by the Byzantine Institute of America between 1930 and the 1950s, documenting fieldwork at monuments such as Hagia Sophia and Kariye Camii, Istanbul, and St. Anthony's Monastery, Egypt.

To access the Byzantine photograph collections, please check the finding aids and inventories listed below, as well as Harvard University Library’s Visual Information Access (VIA) system.

Digital Collections

Black and White Photograph Collections

Site Books

Also included in the Byzantine Photographs and Fieldwork Collections are the following photograph and archival collections:

Census of Objects of Early Christian and Byzantine Art in North American Collections

The collection, begun in 1936 by Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss to provide visual and documentary reference material for the study of objects in their art collection, contains over 11,000 mounted black-and-white photographic prints filed by medium, stylistic and chronological characteristics, and region of origin. The collection was updated in the 1970s and in the mid 1980s. Documentation sheets for each object are located in loose-leaf notebooks and are filed alphabetically by city of present location, collection, and accession number.

Census of Byzantine Textiles in North American Collections

The collection consists of 2,500 black-and-white photographs of Byzantine textiles located in museums in the United States and Canada. Brought together in the 1950s, the collection is organized alphabetically by the city and museum, and includes a card file documenting each object.

Corpus of Early Christian and Byzantine Silver

The Silver Corpus is a collection of photographs, completed in 1986, containing 3,500 black-and-white images of approximately 1,500 Byzantine silver vessels and utensils produced between 300 and 1453 AD. The Corpus includes all known (c. 1985) silver vessels and utensils produced for liturgical and domestic use within the geographical boundaries of the Roman and Byzantine empires. Silver vessels from Western Europe through the seventh century and Veneto-Byzantine silver are included; Sassanian silver, coins, jewelry, armor, icon frames, settings, and ingots are excluded. Photographs are arranged by geographic location and institution. Additional indices include a reference card file for each object in the Corpus arranged by object type and hoard components. This collection can be found within the Black and White Print File collection under metalwork.

Study Collection

This collection consists of photographs and documentation of site plans, church plans, and mosaic pavements, as well as book illustrations and bibliographies of archeological sites in Egypt, Italy, Greece, and North Africa. Organized alphabetically by country then site, it was brought together in the 1940s and 1950s as a study project of Byzantine archaeology.

Franklin M. Biebel Photograph Albums

This collection consists of thirty-one albums assembled by Franklin M. Biebel around 1955. The albums include photographs, plans, and documentary information on floor mosaics from Byzantium and the West.

Arthur Kingsley Porter Photographs

This collection consists of photographs of Byzantine and Medieval architecture, wall paintings, and sculpture from Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, and Turkey as well as photographs of manuscripts and objects from Italy and Greece. These albums are arranged by country, city, site, or monument. The original negatives are at the Fogg Museum, Harvard University.

Illuminated Manuscript Pages

This collection consists of over 10,000 black-and-white photographs of manuscripts pages and manuscript illuminations. Assembled in the 1950s, the photographs are arranged by city, library collection, and then manuscript and folio number.

Kurt Weitzmann Photograph Archive

The collections consist of photographs of Greek manuscripts, Latin manuscripts, and ancient book illuminations compiled by Kurt Weitzmann, member of the Princeton University faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Institute for Advanced Studies (1935–1993). The collection of nearly 17,000 black-and-white photographs duplicates the Kurt Weitzmann Archive at Princeton University.
Finding Aid

Archival Collections