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 work has been supported by membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the inaugural Guggenheim Fellowship in Early Modern Studies. In 2025, she was the Panofsky Professor at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. In the spring of 2027, she will be a Resident at the American Academy in Rome. She joined the Yale faculty in 2016.

Her current projects include a major monograph reconsidering the impact of Desiderius Erasmus on the visual arts of the sixteenth century. She is also at work on a second book project called Flights: An Art History of Birds. Her latest book Holbein’s Margins: Printing Alliances in Renaissance Basel is forthcoming with Deutscher Kunstverlag in early 2027.

Bass’s previous publications include The Monument’s End: Public Art and the Modern Republic (Princeton 2024); 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 previous 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 topics that engage with the art of northern Europe from a cross-disciplinary perspective. 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, former Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History of Art Department, and former Chair of Yale’s Program in Early Modern Studies. In addition, 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