Letter from Marvin Ross to Mildred Bliss, 1703 32nd St. and an article from Archaeology on a Byzantine glass lamp, April 3, 1957 Digital

Handwritten note from Marvin C. Ross to Mildred Bliss and sending his recently published article titled "A tenth century Byzantine glass lamp" published in Archaeology, volume 10, issue 1, 1957. Marvin tells Mildred the Byzantines were practical in their daily life. "A scholar could lower his lamp for reading or raise it for diffused light!"

The article highlights a tenth century Byzantine glass lamp acquired in 1946 for the Dumbarton Oaks Collection "from a dealer who stated that it came from Constantinople." The article describes the glass lamp with a shape of a squat cone with three chains suspended with a hook and considerable Manganese. He writes that the Manganese decorative glass is typical of western fifth and sixth centuries, but Ray Winfield Smith feels that there is "no reason for it not to be used at a later period and elsewhere."

"A Byzantine manuscript (Byzantine Gospel Book (Add. Mss. 28815) in the British Museum illuminated in Constantinople in the tenth century has a miniature of St. Luke reading by the light of a lamp almost the duplicate of the one in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection." The miniature shows a cord attached to a hook and passing through two pulleys and a weight that allows for the lamp to be raised and lowered to the desired height.

Marvin writes in the article: "The late Professor A.M. Friend, who had made a study of these Evangelist portraits, assured him that this [the Dumbarton Oaks glass lamp] was not an element surviving from earlier times." Marvin makes the case that with almost certainty the Dumbarton Oaks lamp is contemporary and a type used in Constantinople in the tenth century even though "no glass factory has yet been found in Constantinople at that time."