Substance, Creation and Transformation in the Cappella Altieri in Rome

CREMS Seminar

Refreshments available 15 minutes before the start

Richard Checketts

Lecturer in Renaissance Art and Culture, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds.

Research Interests

I joined the School in Autumn 2011 as Lecturer in Renaissance Art and Culture. Prior to this I was for two years based at the Victoria & Albert Museum, teaching on the postgraduate programme in Design History run jointly by the Museum and the Royal College of Art.

My current research centres on ideas about materials in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Broadly this involves mapping the connections, resistances and transformations that occurred through encounters between made objects and questions about materiality in other areas of the culture in this period - both in the direct engagements with such questions in scientific or philosophical thought, and also in a range of other discourses and practices, from religion, to economics, to law. Most recently I have been working on polychrome marble in architectural decoration Rome in the 1670s (in relation both to constructions of political power and theories of geology) and on 'auricular' design in the Netherlands (in relation both to the science of matter and definitions of property). Alongside these projects, I am currently completing a study of the unfinished writings on art left by the third Earl of Shaftesbury when he died in Naples in 1713.

I am also involved with a collaborative, inter-disciplinary project on Histories of Materiality, initiated jointly with colleagues at the Victoria & Albert Museum (Dr Marta Ajmar) and University College London (Dr Victor Buchli).