The Life and Metamorphosis of Forms: Focillon’s Influence on Baltrušaitis’s Morphology

The intent of this paper is to demonstrate the profound influence of Henri Focillon on the thought of Jurgis Baltrušaitis. Their meeting in 1924 marked a crucial moment in Baltrušaitis’s intellectual life for the next twenty years. Focillon sparked in him a strong interest in medieval art, which led to a significant turning point in his career. The notions of “survival” and “revival” of forms represent just two of the many legacies Baltrušaitis received from his master. Baltrušaitis took up Focillon’s idea of the “awakening of ancient backgrounds,” according to which Gothic art recalls and evokes the Romanesque fantastic, but he further deepened this conception. Baltrušaitis pointed to and radicalized Focillon’s methodology, seeking extremely precise documentation, rich in exotic elements such as oriental influences and monstrous figures. In his works, he devoted large passages to the rediscovery of stylistic precedents, distant in time, highlighting examples of formal continuity. Both Baltrušaitis and Focillon were convinced that the life of forms revealed laws and constants. Baltrušaitis took the path traced by his master and realized his dream: to discover and verify, beyond the contingency of forms, a morphological necessity that would be answered by the constancy of formal laws that govern the evolution of artistic forms over time.