Professor George Zarnecki was a leading authority on the Romanesque. He settled in England after the Second World War and joined the staff of the Courtauld Institute of Art, becoming one of a number of distinguished medievalists who have helped to shape the character of that institution.

The pioneering studies of English Romanesque sculpture that he began in the late 1940s made a lasting contribution to our understanding of this country’s artistic history.

Jerzy Zarnecki was born in Poland in 1915. He attended Cracow University and became a junior assistant in the Institute of the History of Art in 1936. He completed an MA at the university in 1938. This part of his life and career was ended by the German invasion the following year. Zarnecki joined the Polish Army and fought with distinction in France, receiving the Polish Cross of Valour and the Croix de Guerre. He was captured in 1940 and spent two years as a prisoner of war before managing to escape, only to be interned in Spain. He made his way to England in 1943 and rose to the rank of lance-corporal in the Polish forces in London, where he at first spoke little English. Much of his time was spent helping to compile an index of the cultural losses sustained by his homeland as a result of the German occupation. He published an English introduction to Polish art in 1945.

When the war ended Zarnecki made his home in England. He was married to Anne Frith and found employment at the Courtauld, based at 20 Portman Square, at first translating texts. He owed this job to the help of the institute’s soon-to-be director, Anthony Blunt, to whom he had been introduced in 1944.

Generous and witty as well as learned, Zarnecki was an immensely popular figure at the Courtauld. He became the librarian of the Conway Library in 1949, managing its remarkable collection of photographs of sculpture and architecture and pioneering expeditions to build up the library’s holdings, embarking on entertaining odysseys around Europe with his friend and fellow medievalist Peter Lasko.

Zarnecki was appointed Reader in 1959, and in 1961, after a year as Oxford’s Slade Professor of Fine Art, he succeeded Johannes Wilde as Blunt’s deputy-director at the Courtauld, a position he held until 1974. He became Professor of Art History in 1963.

Zarnecki’s influence in these years was hugely beneficial to the Courtauld and its reputation. Peter Kidson recorded that his importance can hardly be overestimated, not least because his responsibilities extended to almost running the institute on Blunt’s behalf. Despite an association that lasted for 30 years, Zarnecki found Blunt elusive — an assessment that many shared. When, in 1979, Blunt was exposed as having spied for the Soviet Union Zarnecki was horrified and could not bring himself to speak to him.

Zarnecki’s study of English Romanesque sculpture was prompted by a fellow émigré scholar, Fritz Saxl of the Warburg Institute. Any student of the subject must overcome the lack of documentary evidence and the destruction of many of the sculptures themselves, with others surviving in a poor state of preservation.

“Only a fraction of what existed has come down to us,” Zarnecki wrote, “and the often mutilated state of the objects is an eloquent testimony to the fanaticism of the iconoclast or to ignorant neglect.” Saxl, though, had taken an interest in the subject and encouraged Zarnecki in what became his doctoral dissertation.

This led to two books in the early 1950s: English Romanesque Sculpture 1066-1140 (1951) and Later English Romanesque Sculpture 1140-1210 (1953). These short works, extensive in their ambition and based on meticulous scholarship, were freshly and lucidly written introductions to a topic that had received little serious consideration; they transformed our understanding of the subject.

Zarnecki emphasised that the English Romanesque was a regional development of the astonishing artistic revival of the 11th century that embraced the whole of Western and Central Europe. He described the character of what he termed Anglo-Norman sculpture, carefully charting its development from the earliest influence of the Romanesque in England in the decade or two before 1066 through to its 12th-century maturity.

He questioned the commonly held view that the Norman Conquest was an unwelcome foreign intrusion that brought to an end Anglo-Saxon art, instead emphasising the survival of the complex artistic traditions the Normans inherited at the Conquest in the continuing influence of the Winchester School and Scandinavian animal styles such as the Ringerike.

Anglo-Saxon sculpture did not, Zarnecki suggested, “die an heroic death at Hastings”, but rather remained vibrant, flourishing in a great blossoming of artistic life and influencing to an unexpected extent the art of Normandy and other areas of northern France.

Zarnecki published revealing studies of the Romanesque sculptures at the cathedrals of Ely (1958) and Lincoln (1964), profusely illustrated with photographs, as had been his earlier books, in an effort to make images of these sculptures more widely available for enjoyment and study. His fascination with his subject was demonstrated in numerous essays over 40 years, subsequently collected in two volumes: Studies in Romanesque Sculpture (1979) and Further Studies in Romanesque Sculpture (1992).

His interests, though, ranged wider. He published a study of the 12th-century French sculptor Gislebertus in 1960, with an English edition the following year, and in the 1970s produced Romanesque Art (1971), addressing the subject as a whole, The Monastic Achievement (1972) and Art of the Medieval World (1975).

In the early 1980s he chaired the working committee organising the Arts Council’s exhibition English Romanesque Art 1066-1200, held at the Hayward Gallery in 1984 and giving, in Zarnecki’s words, “a glimpse of the beauty of this distant and largely forgotten period”.

He received the Polish Gold Medal of Merit in 1978 and became a member of the Polish Academies of Learning and of Sciences in the 1990s. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1968 and was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, where he was for a time vice-president. He was appointed CBE in 1970.

On his retirement in 1982 Zarnecki was made Emeritus Professor of the University of London and became an honorary Fellow of the Courtauld Institute in 1986. In 1987 he was the leading figure behind the creation of the British Academy’s Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, an archive recording Romanesque stone sculpture in these islands.

Zarnecki is survived by his wife, Anne, and their son and daughter.

Professor George (Jerzy) Zarnecki, CBE, historian of the Romanesque, was born on September 12, 1915. He died on September 8, 2008, aged 92