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 Romanian medieval culture. He had a „labyrinth” destiny, with periods of ascent and vertiginous ”falling”, 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 reprinted 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 14th and the 18thcenturies had the at least two so-called pre-Renaissance– moments of significant remodeling 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 16th century and the second in the middle of the 17th century