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Titus Burckhardt, a German Swiss, was of the traditionalist or perennialist 20th century
school of thought, devoting his life to the study of wisdom and tradition. A major voice of
philosophia perennis, he was highly articulate in the realms of existentialism,
psychoanalysis and sociology, and an exponent of universal truth in metaphysics,
cosmology and traditional art. He wrote in German and in French, with a profound
simplicity of expression.
Titus Burckhardt was born in 1908 into a patrician family of Basle (though his birthplace
was in Florence). His father was Carl Burckhardt, a sculptor. His great-uncle was the art
historian Jacob Burckhardt. Frithjof Schuon grew up in Basle at the same time, and Titus
and Frithjof spent their early schooldays together, closely aligned in intellect and spirit.
Burckhardt attended several art schools in Switzerland and Italy. He thereafter went to
Morocco to seek what the West had lost. In his years there, he learned Arabic, and studied
Sufi classics in their original. (Later, he translated Ibn `Arabi, Jili, and Shaikh Mulay al`Arabi al-Darqawi.) Burckhardt developed a deep and vast knowledge of Islamic art and
civilization.
He was the artistic director of the Urs Graf Publishing House of Lausanne and Olten. Here
he produced exceptional illuminated manuscripts for publication, and directed a series of
volumes entitled Sttten des Geistes (Homesteads of the Spirit). His book, Fez, City of
Islam, was part of this series. In 1972, Burckhardt was commissioned by UNESCO make
an inventory of the architectural heritage of Fez, which had been placed on UNESCOs
World Heritage List. To conserve the old city, he recommended a masterplan to safeguard
and rehabilitate Fez. In the following three years he was the cultural consultant of an
interdisciplinary, multinational team of city planners, architects, restorers, and other
specialists, to implement an overall master plan for the city of Fez.
Burckhardt actively participated in the two Festivals of the World of Islam held in London
in the 1970s, and directed the major exhibitions of Islamic Art at the Hayward Gallery in
1976. His monumental efforts and numerous published works were instrumental in the
establishment of graduate programs in Islamic art and architecture as distinct academic
fields in universities around the world, and no less contributed to the establishment of the
major galleries of Islamic art in many museums throughout the world.
He died in Lausanne in 1984.
In all of his writings, Titus Burckhardt intimately touched on science and art, piety and
tradition, beauty and truth. His quest for the Beautiful was a defining of the science of
beauty, a spiritual quest, a search for Truth.
Much of Burckhardts writings are in traditional cosmology, which he called the
handmade of metaphysics. In Alchemy, Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul
(1960), he presented alchemy as the expression of a spiritual psychology and as an
intellectual and symbolic support for contemplation and realization. He brought science and
art together into an integral relationship and showed the importance of the science of the
properties of things (`ilm khawass al-ashya) in understanding how traditional art
transforms the natural objects and materials. For example, he wrote In the spiritual order,
alchemy is none other than the art of transmuting bodily consciousness into spirit: body
must be made spirit, say the alchemists, for spirit to become body. By analogy one can
say of Muslim architecture that it transforms stone into light which, in its turn, is
whose Reality there would be no sina`ah or art worthy of the name. [The Vision of Titus
Ibrahim Burckhardt]
http://elkorg-projects.blogspot.com/2005/04/biography-of-titus-burckhardt1908.html