Titus Burckhardt and Islamic art interpretation

Islamic art has turned into a strong academic discipline, on which countless studies are conducted. The early studies have very important roles in gaining this strength. It is very well known that to open up a new path and create a studying field has always been very difficult. Titus Burckhardt was one who experienced that difficulty. He was born in Florance in 1908 and he was a German Swiss art historian and academician. As a member of a patrician family of Basle, he took part in cultural and art circles. He was interested in sculpture and painting in early ages because of being the son of a sculptor father and an artist mother. Accepting art as a way of living and thinking, Burckhardt adopted applying it as a life philosophy. His concern over the world arts and religions led him to make researches on both Eastern and Western cultures and he produced several books and works of art. He went to Morocco in his twenties to make researches on eastern culture and arts and lived there for a long time. Eventually as a result of that experience, he converted into Muslim. He tried to set forth the relationship between the revelation and the ancient arts. Of course, not only did he give importance to the Eastern and Islamic arts, but also the traditional Western arts and he placed the concept of sacred art at the center of his works. He intended to pursue the sacred and transcendent one in his works and he had a holistic point of view. He prefered taking part in Traditionalist School environment for expressing and realizing his thoughts. Like René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Burckhardt was one of the co-founders of this school and he defended that all the traditional arts conveyed the message of the sacred. He accepted symbolism as a way of expressing the sacred art itself, and he endeavoured to decipher the symbolic language of sacred arts especially the Islamic one. This study aims to contribute to the Islamic art field by examining Titus Burckhardt's and Traditionalist School's assertions. Keywords: Titus Burckhardt, Sacred Art, Islamic Art, Traditionalist School, Perennial Philosophy, Symbolism.