JURGIO BALTRUŠAIČIO INTELEKTUALINĖS BIOGRAFIJOS VINGIAI
The Intellectual Biography of Jurgis Baltrušaitis

Summary/Abstract: The main aim of this article is to draw an intellectual biography of the world-known art historian Jurgis Baltrušaitis. The study constitutes an exposition of the genesis of the methodology and conception of the most prominent representative of Henri Focillon's school. It also discusses the influences of his father's thought and of the Russian and German doctrines of formalism on the formation of Baltrušaitis' world view. On the other hand, it shows the distinctively original aspects of his methodology, which let him write new pages of "life of forms" and reveal its margins, deformations, artistic fallacy, fictions and myths. His innovative method of metamorphology opened up a lot of artistic and cultural phenomena (anamorhposes, aberrations, curious perspectives, mythical forms and formal myths) which were ignored by positivist research. Besides, the article shows that individual experience also left footprints on the methodology of Baltrušaitis, who always searched for the norm in deviation or for the rules of artistic and scientific imagination which deform and form the reality.

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