The Essex Lectures in Art History: Professor Caspar Pearson Lecture 1

The Essex Lectures in Art History are held each year. In June 2025 the lectures are titled 'Space, Time and Representation in the Sassetti Chapel.'

One: Raising the Dead: History and the Portrait

The Sassetti Chapel, in Florence, is one of the most radical experiments in representation of the entire Italian Renaissance. This lecture will introduce the chapel through a close visual analysis of one of its frescoes. It will return to the pioneering work of Aby Warburg and consider how his creative approach to portrait painting in the chapel continues to offer important suggestions for the study of these works.

Bio:

Caspar Pearson is Reader in Art History and Director of Studies at the Warburg Institute in London, specialising in the art, architecture and urbanism of the Italian Renaissance. His research focuses particularly on architectural treatises and other types of architectural writings. He has worked extensively on the fifteenth-century architect and theorist, Leon Battista Alberti. His first book, Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City was published by Pennsylvania University Press in 2011. His recent biography of Alberti, Leon Battista Alberti: The Chameleon’s Eye, was published by Reaktion Books in 2022. Caspar has also written about contemporary Britain and Europe, often in regard to the afterlives of the Renaissance and always in relation to cities and places. His current project is on Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fifteenth-century frescoes in the Sassetti Chapel, Florence, and especially Ghirlandaio’s approach to the representation of the city.

Each lecture is one hour, followed by a 45-minute Q&A session.

This event will be in-person, but a Zoom link is available for those who wish to attend remotely. To register for the event or to request the Zoom link, please contact phaispg@essex.ac.uk