The Paleochristian and Byzantine Archaeology chair was created on February 18 1946 by transforming the Langues, histoire et archéologie de l'Asie centrale chair, and took over the activities carried out by Gabriel Millet from 1926 to 1937. André Grabar, elected in 1946, had already succeeded Gabriel Millet at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1937. His teaching was characterized by a strong international outlook, which took him out of France for several months each year until his retirement in 1966. Closely associated with Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks Institute of Byzantine Studies from 1947 onwards, he made the most of his professorship to encourage collaboration between researchers on the publication of sources and archaeological projects. He also took part in numerous scientific activities in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Slavic world. These intellectual encounters naturally lead him to consider the Byzantine Empire as a plural world, studying in particular the uses and formal characteristics of Syrian, Balkan and Russian cultures.

His research has also led him to consider the links between monuments and the intellectual universe of men of the past. Attentive to religious concerns, he highlights, for example, the cult of relics in the structuring of Byzantine art and architecture, and while he does not deny foreign influences, he strives to show that over the course of a millennium an entirely new intellectual universe was being developed, one that concerned the conception of the state and the world. Grabar's teaching at the Collège de France follows on from his works L'Empereur dans l'art byzantin (1936) and Martyrium (1943-1946), in which he already focused on monuments " inspired by belief ". The incipit of the latter book serves as an emblem : " like the relic, the emperor who is both man and God belongs simultaneously to the sensible and the intelligible ".

A key player in the creation of the Psychologie des arts plastiques chair at the Collège de France (1949), he focuses his teaching and research on the links between art and literature, insofar as they can teach about the conception of images, objects and ceremonial. For example, he links imperial art to literary interpretations, and is one of the first to consider hagiographies as revealing sources of information on ancient world conceptions.

Notice written by Marc Verdure (Collège de France - Institut des Civilisations).