“I see three times”: Time and Space in the Sassetti Chapel, Florence

Description

Please join us next Thursday, 9th March, for the Renaissance and Early Modern Art Seminar, to be held in Trinity Hall’s Graham Storey Room at 12:30pm.

Caspar Pearson (Warburg Institute)

This paper focuses on the strange contemporaneity of Domenico Ghirlandaio’s frescos in the Sassetti Chapel, Santa Trinita, Florence. Ever since Aby Warburg’s early twentieth-century publications on the subject, scholars have been puzzled by the mixtures of times and places that are found in the frescos and by the proliferation of contemporary portraits in some of the scenes. The paper argues that the frescos can, among other things, be understood as a powerful meditation upon the idea of time itself; one that is informed by both theology and everyday experience, and that arises from the interplay between the ideas of time, space, place, and the pictorial imagination.