Painted Copy of Deesis Mosaic

Painted Copy of Deesis Mosaic

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The original mosaic displaying the Deesis (Christ flanked by the Virgin and Saint John the Baptist) was one of the finest works produced in Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. Concealed for centuries after the fall of the city to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the mosaic was one of the many in Hagia Sophia restored by the Byzantine Institute of America in the late 1930s. The newly revealed mosaics were the focus of an exhibition at the Museum in 1944, when this work, the only full-scale, exact, and authorized copy of the Deesis mosaic, was featured.

Medieval Art and The Cloisters

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Painted Copy of Deesis MosaicPainted Copy of Deesis MosaicPainted Copy of Deesis MosaicPainted Copy of Deesis MosaicPainted Copy of Deesis Mosaic

The Museum's collection of medieval and Byzantine art is among the most comprehensive in the world. Displayed in both The Met Fifth Avenue and in the Museum's branch in northern Manhattan, The Met Cloisters, the collection encompasses the art of the Mediterranean and Europe from the fall of Rome in the fourth century to the beginning of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century. It also includes pre-medieval European works of art created during the Bronze Age and early Iron Age.