Within less than twelve months in the years 1955 and 1956 three senior members of the Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University departed this life: Charles Rufus Morey, Albert Matthias Friend, and Earl Baldwin Smith. All three were scholars of distinction, and of all three it can be safely asserted that through their own work and through their influence upon their numerous students they decisively shaped the character and quality of American scholarship in the field of medieval art. This is especially true of Morey, who may be said to have made the tradition so hopefully inaugurated by Dr. Allan Marquand and to have passed the torch on to his pupils. If the invitation to catalogue the Museo Sacro of the Vatican Library was an extraordinary compliment paid to Morey, the master, the appointment to the office of Director of Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection of Harvard University was an outstanding distinction conferred upon Friend, his pupil. It was in this position that Friend's activities and influence assumed more and more international or cosmopolitan proportions, and so it came about that when the plan of a ‘Festschrift’ to be presented to him on his sixtieth anniversary was broached, not only colleagues and pupils of Princeton University, but more than one foreign scholar whom he had been instrumental in bringing to Dumbarton Oaks was invited to participate. The result was the volume now under consideration, which comprises in all thirty-two articles in the two fields of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. For all the diversity of subjects treated, which is considerable, there is an extraordinary homogeneity to this liberal A dedicatory inscription composed in brilliant Greek was very appropriately prefixed to the volume, to complete an offering which Friend had the pleasure of receiving more than a year before his death.
