The Essex Lectures in Art History: Professor Caspar Pearson Lecture 2

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.'

Two: Interpolated Spaces

This lecture will examine the vigorously interpolated quality of the frescoes of the Sassetti Chapel, in which portrait types, places and modes and genres of painting are mixed and overlayed in surprising and unusual ways. The lecture considers how this continual blurring of the boundaries between different orders of image in some ways resists the kind of formal and hermeneutic closure often sought in artworks of the period and foregrounds the act of interpretation itself.

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