Marisa Anne Bass

Marisa Anne Bass teaches early modern art history at Yale University, with a particular emphasis on northern Europe and the Netherlands. Her research focuses on how individuals use art to find grounding amid chaos. She seeks to understand how artists have responded to political, spiritual, and cultural upheaval, and how scholars, patrons, and collectors have turned to art to make sense of circumstances that otherwise defy explanation. Her latest book The Monument’s End: Public Art and the Modern Republic (expected with Princeton University Press in 2023) asks whether the making of monuments is ever compatible with the making of a modern republic. In it, Bass explores the tension between individual commemoration and the collective aspiration toward liberty in monumental experiments from the Dutch Republic to the present. She is the author of two prior monographs with Princeton University Press: Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (2016) and Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (2019), winner of the 2020 Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society for the best book in art and music history. She has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.

Photo Credit: Cindy Ringer of LJR Images