New Marisa Bass Article

Professor Marisa Bass has a article titled “The Transi Tomb and the ‘genius’ of Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Funerary Sculpture” forthcoming in the Netherlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek later this year. Her essay, part of an issue of the journal devoted to new scholarly approaches to Netherlandish sculpture, focuses on examples of “transi tombs” that transform the medieval tradition of representing the decaying corpse into an opportunity for the display of sculptural invention. She argues that these works embody the multivalent notion of “genius” in early modernity as a spirit that both guides the artist’s hand and navigates between the earthly and heavenly realms–between what a monument can visibly represent and the ideas to which it can only gesture.