Jurgis Baltrusaitis

Jurgis Baltrusaitis , born in 1903 and dead the January 25th 1988 is a historian of art Lithuania N of French expression.

" I have only one work method: to go to the source, to seek truths texts, beyond the articles of synthesis (...) It is while going to the source that one arrives at an exact vision of the things "

Wire of a poet Symbolist him also called Jurgis Baltrusaitis (1873 - 1944), Jurgis Baltrusaitis comes to Paris to study the Théâtre but its meeting with Henri Focillon in 1924, then professor with the Sorbonne, will cause its vocation.

The first part of the searchs for Baltrusaitis will be carried out within the framework of the teaching of Focillon and within the framework of their friendship. What Baltrusaitis and Focillon will bring to the History Art, it is a better knowledge of the original characters of the Romanesque art and influences which this art underwent through Antiquity gréco-Roman and the East.

It is thanks to the Formalisme set up by Focillon that Baltrusaitis will be able to study the Romanesque art through morphological and comparative studies very elaborate: " It is the method of direct confrontations of the monuments, without taking account of the place and the time, which enabled us to follow step by step the evolution of the figures and the topics where a coherent system " is discovered;.

Baltrusaitis is one of the most outstanding historians of the art of the 20th century, capable of thorough investigations and very pointed observations: it redécouvre, for example, the cranium which is in Anamorphose, a process with the mode under the Tudors, in table the Ambassadors by Holbein. It will also show that many reasons for the Middle Ages are direct fabric loans come from China, establishing unexpected bridges between civilizations which lived in a mutual ignorance of the other.

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