Thus far we've followed the story of discovering, uncovering, and restoring the mosaics of the Great Mosque of Damascus. We've also seen how several segments—nine in total—of those mosaics were meticulously copied by dedicated Damascene artists under French supervision in 1928–1929 for the double purpose of documentation and international display. The color photo is of a 348 cm x 296 cm copy of a segment of the immense Barada Panel (34 m x 7.3 m) adorning the west portico. It is a property of the Louvre Museum in Paris.
The credit for uncovering and copying parts of the mosaics is largely shared between Eustache de Lorey and Marguerite van Berchem. Accurate replicas of the originals (size, color, and shade), the copies were proudly paraded across Europe and the New World. De Lorey died in 1953, five years after exhibiting the copies in the USA. They were to visit Edinburgh in 1958 before they disappeared in some storage area in the Louvre. Apart from van Berchem, who briefly studied the mosaics in the 1960s, they'd been all but forgotten until their "rediscovery" between 1999 and 2009. Second from the right in the attached black-and-white photo is the same mosaic copy in the colored image, on display at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris between May and July 1931.
The importance of the ʾUmayyād mosaics cannot be overstated as far as the history of art is concerned; they may very well be considered the "missing link" in its continuity from the Hellenistic and Byzantine ages all the way to the Islamic.
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