Page 9 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Author’s Remarks and Acknowledgements
My introductory remarks to this book are mostly related to the fact that the material included within it was completed much earlier as a doctoral dissertation and as such has been accessible to the public in printed form since 2012, more than a decade before the present publication. For a studious reader, this is rather significant, because with this information they can discern whether publications which occurred after 2012 build on or borrow from the research outcomes of the present work.
More particularly, this book has initially been written under a different title as a doc- toral dissertation, which was defended in 2012 at the University of Sydney, Australia. The title of the dissertation was: The Diachronic Character of Late Byzantine Painting: The Hermeneutics of Vision from Mistra to New York. Since 2012 until now, the printed co- lour-version of the doctoral dissertation has been available in a number of university libraries. During that period, I have presented significant parts of the material included here at various lectures and conferences, as well as at a Workshop at Oxford University in 2016. It should be stressed that in terms of both the essential content and the present- ed arguments and outcomes of my research, but also, in terms of numerous authentic visual comparisons and authentic visual demonstrations, the present book is the same as my dissertation completed in 2012.
That said, for this revised publication, I have deliberately made technical changes and merely modified certain aspects of the content, which are mainly related to the rear- ranged sequence of chapters in the first half of the work. Further still, in my last and final editing of this work, comparatively speaking, I very much tended to cut down the text of the initial dissertation rather than increase it, while quite deliberately not trying to alter the obvious dissertation-like manner in which the initial work was written. In this pro- cess, the chapter related to the modernism of the frescoes at Mistra was decreased to a very concise summary of an otherwise comprehensive chapter in the dissertation.
Most importantly, notwithstanding the aforementioned minor changes and minor modifications applied in this publication, the actual date of this material being first avail-
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