Implications for the development

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Constantin I. CIOBANU
doctor habilitat în studiul artelor
secretar științific al Institutului de Istoria Artei „G. Oprescu”
al Academiei Române, șef al compartimentului Arte vizuală și arhitectură
email: [e-mail] 
UN CERCETĂTOR NOTORIU AL ARTEI MEDIEVALE ROMÂNEŞTI
(IN MEMORIAM PAVEL CHIHAIA)
Summary. A notorious researcher of Romanian medieval art (in memory of Pavel Chihaia). 
Last year, on June 18, at the venerable 97-year-old, in Bavaria, Munich, died Pavel Chihaia – a talented 
novelist, prolific essayist and eminent art historian, particularly concerned with researching in Ro-
manian medieval culture. He had a „labyrinth” destiny, with periods of ascent and vertiginous ”fall-
ing”, with promising beginnings but also with difficult years in which it was subjected to persecution. 
From 1958 and – with minor interruptions – until 1978, when together with his wife Maria-Ioanahe 
requested political asylum in Germany, Pavel Chihaia was a researcher at the Institute of Art History 
in Bucharest. During the two decades when he worked in this institution he developed his major part 
of the scientific work – over seventy studies in the history of culture and art – many of which were re-
printed in 1998 by the „Albatros” publishing house in the extensive synthesis named „Medieval Art” 
and composed of five volumes. Pavel Chihaia tried and – largely succeeded – to identify and introduce 
into the scientific circuit some important features of the medieval and pre-modern civilization in the 
Romanian space. His basic idea is that the Wallachia – situated both in the area of influence of the 
West and of the Byzantium, later of the Ottoman Empire, – during the time period between the 14
th
and the 18
th
centuries had the at least two so-called pre-Renaissance– moments of significant remodel-
ing of the mentalities, of the reception of the new Western cultural models and of their reintegration 
in an original artistic synthesis: the first in the first quarter of the 16
th
century and the second in the 
middle of the 17
th
century.