Scholar of Renaissance and Baroque art history, Director of the Warsaw Museum of Fine Arts. Bia?ostocki was born to Jan Bia?ostocki (Sr.), a musician and composer and Walentya Wereninow. In 1928 the family moved to Grodzisk Mazowiecki (Poland). He grew up in Poland during the years of ever-increasing German dominance and finally invasion. His first art-history article was a piece on Mattias Grünewald published in 1938.

Historian of art and literature; wrote a number of influential art history books. Some of his works were translated from Polish to German by the art historians Rosa Schapire.

Medievalist art historian; influential in French Romanesque studies and stained glass. Grodecki was raised in a Polish-speaking family in Russian-controlled Poland. When he was eighteen, he left to study stagecraft under Emil Preetorius (1883-1973) in Berlin. Later he moved to Paris, enrolling at the école du Louvre. His teacher, Charles Mauricheau-Beaupré advised him to take courses by Henri Focillon at the Sorbonne and Collège de France.

Giotto scholar; notes about Koltanski's opinions appear in Richard Offner's annotated catalog of the 1937 Mostra Giottesca.

art and architectural historian; director of the Museum of the Far East in Köln

Louvre curator of painting and major scholar of French 15th-century art; New York University professor. Sterling was born to a Jewish family in Poland of Scottish decent. He studied law in Poland and was admitted to the bar as a lawyer. His uncle, who owned one of the most successful galleries in Warsaw, instilled an interest in art in him. Sterling married and moved to Paris in 1925 determined now to be an art historian.

Scholar of the Dutch baroque; Warsaw University Professor. Walicki was a curator at the National Museum in Warsaw. In 1950 Walicki was arrested by the Stalinist regime and replaced by Stanislaw Lorentz. His students included Jan Białostocki. His methodology followed a strong connoisseurship model.

Courtauld Institute of Art medievalist, particularly English Romanesque. Zarnecki's father, Zygmunt Zarnecki, was a Polish Jew converted to Catholicism working as a civil engineer in Russia at the time of Zarnecki's birth; his mother was Russian, Julia Wolszczan (Zarnecki). The younger Zarnecki attended Cracow University, Poland, where he worked as a junior assistant in the Art History Institute, 1936-1939, earning an M.A. in 1938. Zarnecki taught at the University of Cracow until 1939.