Juliusz Antoni Chrościcki, an eminent art historian and academic teacher, and a long-time member of the Advisory Committee of Artibus et Historiae died aged 80 on the night of 16 January 2024. Next to his membership in the Advisory Committee, he served as deputy chair of the IRSA Foundation for the Promotion of Culture from 2017.

Juliusz Antoni Chrościcki was born in Warsaw and graduated in art history from the University of Warsaw. He studied there under renowned professors: Michał Walicki, a scholar with broad interests ranging from surveys of Polish art, to Dutch painting in Poland, to a catalogue of European painting in Polish collections, and, after the latter’s death in 1966, under Juliusz Starzyński, a specialist in art theory and history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, a long-time director of the Art Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. However, it was under the supervision of Jan Białostocki (who was then only about to achieve his future fame) that Chrościcki wrote his doctoral dissertation entitled Castrum Doloris. On the Symbolical Meaning of Polish Funerals from the Sixteenth to the early Nineteenth Century, defended in 1971. Incidentally, this very topic was to fascinate him throughout his entire career, reappearing frequently in his research, and reaching a momentum in his participation in an international, pan-European project, Mémoire monarchique et construction de l’Europe. Les stratégies funéraires des dynasties princières du XVI^e au XVIII^e siècle, conducted between 2007 and 2009, in which he was one of the undertaking’s three directors, alongside Professors Gérard Sabatier and Mark Hengerer. The three volumes, summing up research of much broader scope than the mere two years of the project’s duration, carried out by a team of numerous scholars participating in three international conferences, held in Cracow, Madrid, and in Versailles and Saint-Denis, entitled Les funérailles princières en Europe, XVI^e–XVIII^e siècle (published in 2012, 2013, and 2015), are a lasting monument to Juliusz Chrościcki’s scholarly passion and interest for this subject.[1]

Throughout his entire life Juliusz Chrościcki had been associated with his alma mater, except for a short stint as a director of the Centre de la Civilisation Polonaise at the Université Paris IV – Sorbonne in 1995–1998. And all of his life he was interested in the art of Peter Paul Rubens and Polish-Flemish artistic connections, a subject of study related to his research on the Vasa dynasty, which – combined with his detailed attention given to ceremonial dimensions of court art and architecture – resulted in a book for which he was probably most well-known in Poland, namely, a ground-breaking study entitled Art and Politics. Propagandistic Functions of Art in the Age of the Vasa Dynasty 1587–1668 (Warsaw, 1983). This study had laid foundations for his subsequent work on the art patronage of the Vasas and the importance of the propagandistic agenda included in the works of art commissioned by the subsequent monarchs of the Vasa dynasty, which they aptly used in politics, both at home and abroad. However, it was not until 1997 that his interest in Polish-Flemish artistic connections bore fruit in the form of an exhibition exploring the Grand Tour of the prince royal Ladislaus Sigismund Vasa, entitled De prinselijke pelgrimstocht. ‘De Grand Tour’ von Prins Ladislas van Polen 1624–1625, which he helped put up in Antwerp.[2]

His manifold contributions to Polish academic art history and museum exhibitions over the long years of his professional career are too many to be enumerated here, and he will be dearly missed and remembered both as a respected scholar of early modern art, and a reliable friend on whose advice and help one could always count.