Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (40.1999)

Andrzej Rottermund

Stanisław Lorentz
as an Authority on Polish Art
of the Enlightenment

Stanisław Lorentz was an extremely versatile art historian. His scholarly
work and university courses mainly concerned Polish art of the second half
of the eighteenth century, yet his interests led him to study many other eras
in art history. As a museum director, conservator of historie buildings and
monuments, president of associations, and chairman of many international
museum and conservationist organisations, he was involved with topics in the
field of art history regardless of their time and place, and wrote introductions
for numerous exhibition catalogues, books, and occasional publications.

In spite of the astounding variety of his scholarly work, he focused mainly
on Polish Enlightenment art, and on architecture in particular. As a student
and then assistant from 1922 till 1926 to Prof. Zygmunt Batowski at the
Warsaw University department of art history, Lorentz acąuired a solid
academic background and thorough training in research from a distinguished
expert of Polish art. During the 193Os, with his contemporaries Michał
Walicki and Juliusz Starzyński, he was one of the premier young, dynamie
researchers of Polish art.

Thanks to his practical experience, Lorentz was able to approach Polish art
with a very fresh outlook, viewing it in its broader European context and using
the most modern research methods. This was madę possible by his numerous
visits abroad and his personal contacts with English, German and Italian
scholars. Yet Lorentz was not uncritical in his attitude toward methodological
novelties.

Pre-eminent among Professor Lorentz’s pre-war research is the work devoteci
to Jan Krzysztof Glaubitz, an outstanding Vilnius architect who died in 1767.
It was a successful attempt to discover the work of an artist who was very
important for the history of late Polish Baroque architecture. The methods
Lorentz used were based on penetrating analysis of primary source materiał
as well as highly imaginative formal analysis. As a result, the work became
a model for all research on Polish architecture. The particularly rich base of
source materiał in his work on Glaubitz would become an indispensable part

5