Professor Marks has been a curator at the British Museum, Keeper of the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, and Director of the Royal Pavilion and Museums in Brighton. Subsequently he held a Personal Chair in the History of Art Department at the University of York, and is now Emeritus Professor; he also currently has an Honorary Professorship in the History of Art at Cambridge University. He has held honorary posts as Vice-President of The Society of Antiquaries of London and International President of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi project. He has worked on a number of major exhibitions, including Gothic. Art for England 1400–1547 (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2003–4), which he curated.
Professor Marks’ main interest is the religious imagery of medieval Europe, in all the visual arts. Much of his research has been on English stained glass, and, more recently, on the function and reception of devotional images. His works here include 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) and Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (2004). This volume brings together thirty-one of Professor Marks’ studies, encompassing historiography, stained glass, manuscript illumination, screen and wall painting, sculpture and funerary monuments.