Research
Professor Marks’s career began as a museum curator at the British Museum; subsequently he became Keeper of the award-winning Burrell Collection, Glasgow and Director of the Royal Pavilion and Museums in Brighton. In 1992 he took a Personal Chair in the History of Art Department at the University of York, where he remained until 2008. In 2006-7 he was elected to Visiting Fellowships at Fitzwilliam and Churchill colleges and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Amongst honorary posts he has held are those of Vice-President of The Society of Antiquaries of London and International President of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi project.
Professor Marks’s main research interests lie in the function and reception of religious imagery in medieval Europe, encompassing all the visual arts and including museum display and exhibition culture. Much of his research has been on western, principally English, art and particularly stained glass. In this field he has published extensively, including Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (1993), The Medieval Stained Glass of Northamptonshire (1998), The Golden Age of English Manuscript Painting 1200-1500 (1981) (co-authored with Nigel Morgan) and Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (2004). A volume of his collected essays is in the press under the title Art and Imagery in the Middle Ages. He has been involved with several major exhibitions, including most recently the ground-breaking Gothic. Art for England 1400-1547 (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2003-4), which he curated; he also devised and co-edited the prize-winning catalogue. Other books include Burrell. Portrait of a Collector (1983, 2nd revised ed.1988). At present he is working on a book on images of the Rood in the English medieval church.
Richard’s other current project is a cultural biography of the Byzantine icon of the Mother of God of Vladimir, which became the palladium of Russia, and it is in the field of Eastern Orthodox art that he teaches Part II courses on The Art of Holy Russia: Painting, Power and Piety in the Principality of Moscow c.1500-1680 and Byzantine Art and Architecture in Constantinople 843-1204.
