Prof. Dr Hab. Jan Białostocki (1921–1988) – considered Poland’s most eminent art historian, who belonged to the international humanities elite of the 20th century. He was a professor at the University of Warsaw and a curator at the National Museum in Warsaw. He also taught at Yale University, New York University, Pennsylvania State University and the College de France; he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. He was the author of over 500 major scholarly studies, including numerous books about art from the Late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century: Les Primitifs flamands. Les Musées de Pologne (1966), Spätmittelalter und beginnende Neuzeit (1972), The Art of the Renaissance in Eastern Europe: Hungary, Bohemia, Poland (1976), Dürer and his Critics, 1500–1971 (1986), Il quattrocento nell’Europa Settentrionale (1989, French edition: L’Art du XVe siecle des Parler a Dürer, 1993; in Polish: Sztuka XV wieku od Parlerów do Dürera, 2010). His interests also included the theory of art, the history of artistic theories, the history of art history as a scholarly discipline and the methodology of art history and the humanities (including Historia sztuki wśród nauk humanistycznych, 1980); he edited a fundamental series of anthologies of sources, Myśliciele, kronikarze i artyści o sztuce od starożytności do 1500 r., Teoretycy, pisarze i artyści o sztuce 1500–1600 and Teoretycy, historiografowie i artyści o sztuce 1600–1700 (1978–94). Numerous articles by his colleagues, peers and successors discuss his gigantic body of work (most recently, Antoni Ziemba, “Jan Białostocki [1921–1988],” Rocznik Historii Sztuki, vol. 36 (2011), pp. 157–71).
