Marisa Bass

B.A., Yale University, 2003
M.A., Harvard University, 2006
Ph.D., Harvard University, 2011

Marisa Bass is a scholar of early modern art whose research explores the intersections between creative and intellectual culture in northern Europe. Her interests include the representation of nature, the cult of images, portraiture, Renaissance notions of imagination and invention, print culture, the painting of everyday life, emblematics, antiquarianism, monuments, and miniatures. Her work has been supported by membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and by the inaugural Guggenheim Fellowship in Early Modern Studies. She joined the Yale faculty in 2016. In the summer of 2025, she will be the Panofsky Professor at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.

Bass is currently writing the definitive monograph on Desiderius Erasmus and the visual arts over the long sixteenth century. This book takes as its premise that Erasmus’s thoughts about visual art matter less than how artists thought with him. She is also at work on a second book project called Flights: A History of Birds in Art, as well as articles on Samuel van Hoogstraten’s illusionistic art in England, Bruegel’s representations of corporal punishment, ‘accoutrementality’ in the work of Dutch women artists, and Constantijn Huygens’ tandem interest in urban infrastructure and malacology. 

Her latest book The Monument’s End: Public Art and the Modern Republic was published by Princeton University Press in 2024. An interview about the book with Tyler Green is available here on the Modern Art Notes Podcast. An interview with Mark Lynch on Connecticut Public Radio is also available here.

Bass’s previous publications include Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton 2019), winner of the 2020 Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society for the best book in art and music history; Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (Princeton 2016); and her co-authored volume Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe (Princeton 2021). Her exhibition projects include Beyond Bosch: The Afterlife of a Renaissance Master in Print (St. Louis 2015, Harvard 2016), co-curated with Elizabeth Wyckoff, and mentorship of the student-curated exhibition Thinking Small: Dutch Art to Scale (New Haven 2023, Boston 2023-24).

Bass works with students who think within and beyond the traditional bounds of the “Renaissance.” She considers graduate applications on any aspect of early modern art and material culture from the 15th to the early 18th century, particularly—but not limited to—subjects that engage with the art of northern Europe from a cross-disciplinary perspective. She teaches and advises on topics that include the collector’s cabinet; the history of the book; political art and propaganda; cross-cultural exchange; gender, race, and the body; natural history; cartography; still life; anatomical images; the urban environment; the history of the book; iconoclasm and iconophilia; and on knowledge production more broadly. 

At present Bass is Chair of Yale’s Program in Early Modern Studies. In addition, she is a member of the executive committee of Yale’s Humanities Program, an affiliate of Yale’s program in the History of Science and Medicine, and a former Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History of Art Department. She has served on the advisory boards of The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Historians of Netherlandish Art, and the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

For links to publications and further details, see Bass’s personal website:  marisabass.org