The Universality of Sacred Art

by Titus Burckhardt

With text drawn from the author's major work, Sacred Art in East and West, and so arranged as to provide a concise comparative study of five of the world's great religious traditions, this slender volume explains how sacred art can be identified by its style and method, and why some European art commonly regarded as sacred was in fact profane art using religious themes. Although canonical art is now seen as having restricted the development of creative possibilities, the author maintains that, on the contrary, its function was to lead men to true freedom-the release of the spirit from its earthly bonds-whereas contemporary art signifies an abandonment of the soul to any influences that may take possession of it.

Paperback

About the author

Titus Burckhardt (Ibrahim Izz al-Din after his Islamic name), a German Swiss, was born in Florence, Italy in 1908 and died in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1984.He devoted all his life to the study and exposition of the different aspects of Wisdom tradition.

He was an eminent member of the "Traditionalist School" of twentieth-century authors. He was a frequent contributor to the journal Studies in Comparative Religion along with other prominent members of the school.
Burckhardt was the scion of a patrician family of Basel. He was the great-nephew of the art-historian Jacob Burckhardt and the son of the sculptor Carl Burckhardt. Titus Burckhardt was a contemporary of Frithjof Schuon – leading exponent of traditionalist thought in the twentieth century – and the two spent their early school days together in Basel around the time of the First World War. This was the beginning of an intimate friendship and harmonious intellectual and spiritual relationship that was to last a lifetime.

Burckhardt was, as his grandfather, a connoisseur of Islamic art, architecture and civilisation. He compiled and published work from the Sufi masters: Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), Abd-al-karim Jili (1365–1424) and Muhammad al-Arabi al-Darqawi (1760–1823).