Marisa Bass
Yale University, History of Art, Faculty Member
- Renaissance Humanism, 16th Century Netherlandish Art, 17th Century Netherlandish Art, 15th Century Netherlandish Art, Early Modern print culture, Northern Renaissance Art, and 20 moreJan Gossaert, Hoefnagel, Civitates orbis terrarum, vedute di citta, Maarten van Heemskerck, Northern Renaissance, Natural History, 16th and 17th century Dutch and Flemish Art, Print Culture, Early Modern History, Renaissance Studies, History of Natural History, 17th Century Dutch Republic, History of Science, Dutch Revolt, History of Antwerp, Renaissance Art, Christine Korsgaard, Philosophy and Sociology of Human/animal Relations, Human-Animal Relations, Human-Animal Studies, and Human-Animal Relationshipsedit
- marisabass.orgedit
This pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low Countries. Insect Artifice explores the moment when the seismic forces... more
This pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low Countries. Insect Artifice explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At its center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to the study of nature in this era of political and spiritual upheaval. Presented here for the first time are more than eighty pages in color facsimile of Hoefnagel’s encyclopedic masterwork, which showcase both the splendor and eccentricity of its meticulously painted animals, insects, and botanical specimens.
Marisa Anne Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel’s writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical learning and empirical inquiry in which he participated. Bass reveals how Hoefnagel and his colleagues engaged with natural philosophy as a means to reflect on their experiences of war and exile, and found refuge from the threats of iconoclasm and inquisition in the manuscript medium itself. This is a book about how destruction and violence can lead to cultural renewal, and about the transformation of Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Golden Age.
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13413.html
Marisa Anne Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel’s writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical learning and empirical inquiry in which he participated. Bass reveals how Hoefnagel and his colleagues engaged with natural philosophy as a means to reflect on their experiences of war and exile, and found refuge from the threats of iconoclasm and inquisition in the manuscript medium itself. This is a book about how destruction and violence can lead to cultural renewal, and about the transformation of Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Golden Age.
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13413.html
Research Interests: Zoology, Entomology, Early Modern History, History of Natural History, History of Science, and 15 moreRenaissance Art, Iconoclasm, Early Modern Europe, Political History, History of The Netherlands, Natural History, 16th Century Netherlandish Art, Republic of Letters (Early Modern History), History of the Spanish-Habsburg Netherlands, Nature, History of Collecting, Dutch Revolt, Natural history collections, Insects, and Joris Hoefnagel
This is the first in-depth historical study of Jan Gossart (ca. 1478-1532), one of the most important painters of the Renaissance in northern Europe. Providing a richly illustrated narrative of the Netherlandish artist's life and art,... more
This is the first in-depth historical study of Jan Gossart (ca. 1478-1532), one of the most important painters of the Renaissance in northern Europe. Providing a richly illustrated narrative of the Netherlandish artist's life and art, Marisa Anne Bass shows how Gossart's paintings were part of a larger cultural effort in the Netherlands to assert the region's ancient heritage as distinct from the antiquity and presumed cultural hegemony of Rome.
Focusing on Gossart's vibrant, monumental mythological nudes, the book challenges previous interpretations by arguing that Gossart and his patrons did not slavishly imitate Italian Renaissance models but instead sought to contest the idea that the Roman past gave the Italians a monopoly on antiquity. Drawing on many previously unused primary sources in Latin, Dutch, and French, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity offers a fascinating new understanding of both the painter and the history of northern European art at large.
Focusing on Gossart's vibrant, monumental mythological nudes, the book challenges previous interpretations by arguing that Gossart and his patrons did not slavishly imitate Italian Renaissance models but instead sought to contest the idea that the Roman past gave the Italians a monopoly on antiquity. Drawing on many previously unused primary sources in Latin, Dutch, and French, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity offers a fascinating new understanding of both the painter and the history of northern European art at large.
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"Shells begin as movable dwellings for the mollusks who create them, but where a shell ends up is far from predetermined. They may go on to have many lives once their makers have left them behind. Whether subsumed into the geological... more
"Shells begin as movable dwellings for the mollusks who create them, but where a shell ends up is far from predetermined. They may go on to have many lives once their makers have left them behind. Whether subsumed into the geological landscape, reoccupied by a hermit crab, or repurposed by humankind, shells are more than exoskeletal remains of life past; they are persistently animable things. To admire a shell’s variegated surface, to feel its sculptural form in one’s hand, or to hear the echo of the sea in the architecture of its inner chamber, is to engage with a curious object that is also an uncanny subject. This chapter explores how early modern artists employed the pictorial realm to think through shells and their resonant histories, and it seeks to understand the encounters with shells that these pictures stage. I take as my starting point a simple premise: the life of a shell in a painting is never a still life..."
For the full volume, see: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691215761/conchophilia
For the full volume, see: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691215761/conchophilia
Research Interests: History of Natural History, Shakespeare, Renaissance Art, Early Modern Europe, Baroque Art and Literature, and 15 moreNatural History, French Renaissance, 16th Century Netherlandish Art, Early Modern Intellectual History, Italian Renaissance Art, Baroque art and architecture, 17th Century Netherlandish Art, Art and Nature, Northern Renaissance Art, Visual and Material Culture, Still Life, History of Collecting, Gastropods, Early Modern Art and Visual Culture, and 16th and 17th century Dutch and Flemish Art
What happens when we look at a canonical painting from the perspective of its non-human occupant? This article explores that question through the case of the dog in Jan van Eyck's "Arnolfini Portrait." Not only is the dog in The Arnolfini... more
What happens when we look at a canonical painting from the perspective of its non-human occupant? This article explores that question through the case of the dog in Jan van Eyck's "Arnolfini Portrait." Not only is the dog in The Arnolfini Portrait fundamental to the fellowship that Van Eyck invites us to feel both with himself and with his work; consideration of his presence also offers an opportunity to reconsider the limitations of traditional art-historical method.
Research Interests: Iconography, Renaissance History, Renaissance Art, Petrarch, Portraiture, and 12 moreFriendship, Self Portraiture, Self-Portraits, 15th Century Netherlandish Art, Leon Battista Alberti, Early Netherlandish Painting, Dogs, Jan Van Eyck, Iconography and Iconology, Netherlands, Erwin Panofsky, and Renaissance Portraiture
"This essay takes up touch and intimacy as the criteria most fundamental to the design and intended impact of flower paintings. My contention is twofold. Firstly, the flower still life as a picture intimates a gesture of reciprocal... more
"This essay takes up touch and intimacy as the criteria most fundamental to the design and intended impact of flower paintings. My contention is twofold. Firstly, the flower still life as a picture intimates a gesture of reciprocal exchange between itself and the viewer. Not only does touch guide the experience of these paintings; the elusiveness of the tactile sense also endows them with their particular allure...
My second and related contention is that the flower still life originated in dialogue with the early modern culture of friendship. When the humanist Juan Luis Vives described the communion between touch and sight as ‘a kind of friendship’—or when Leon Battista Alberti proclaimed painting, like friendship, to possess the ability to make the absent present and the dead seem still alive—both drew on a Ciceronian discourse that was common currency in the Renaissance. The friendship metaphor employed by Vives and Alberti aligns with the practices of early modern amicitia, a concept that encompassed ties of kinship and collegial enterprise. Letter-writing, gift-giving, and the keeping of friendship albums (alba amicorum) in turn informed the ways that the still-life genre first took shape. To paraphrase Vives and Alberti, early flower paintings functioned as living monuments, designed to perpetuate a tangible bond between the painting as giver and the viewer as recipient."
My second and related contention is that the flower still life originated in dialogue with the early modern culture of friendship. When the humanist Juan Luis Vives described the communion between touch and sight as ‘a kind of friendship’—or when Leon Battista Alberti proclaimed painting, like friendship, to possess the ability to make the absent present and the dead seem still alive—both drew on a Ciceronian discourse that was common currency in the Renaissance. The friendship metaphor employed by Vives and Alberti aligns with the practices of early modern amicitia, a concept that encompassed ties of kinship and collegial enterprise. Letter-writing, gift-giving, and the keeping of friendship albums (alba amicorum) in turn informed the ways that the still-life genre first took shape. To paraphrase Vives and Alberti, early flower paintings functioned as living monuments, designed to perpetuate a tangible bond between the painting as giver and the viewer as recipient."
Research Interests: Renaissance Art, 16th Century Netherlandish Art, Friendship, Republic of Letters (Early Modern History), 17th Century Netherlandish Art, and 8 moreLeon Battista Alberti, Art and Nature, Still Life, Touch, Early Modern Art and Visual Culture, Netherlands, Joris Hoefnagel, and Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder
Research Interests: Early Modern History, History of the Book, Renaissance Studies, Renaissance Humanism, Historiography, and 20 moreAnthropology of the Body, History of The Netherlands, 16th Century Netherlandish Art, Antiquarianism, Renaissance antiquarianism, Early Netherlandish Painting, Early Modern print culture, Early Modern Art and Visual Culture, History of Collecting and Antiquarianism, Burgundian Netherlands, Medieval Devotional Culture, Netherlands, Sixteenth Century History, Books of Hours, Adam and Eve, Jan Gossart, Jan Gossaert, The Nude, Gerardus Geldenhouwer, and Jan Mostaert
Research Interests: Renaissance Studies, Renaissance Humanism, Renaissance Art, Erasmus, Reformation Studies, and 34 moreEarly Modern Europe, French Renaissance, Sculpture, 16th Century Netherlandish Art, Northern Renaissance, Humanism, Tomb Sculpture, Northern Renaissance Art, Burgundian Low Countries, Renaissance and Early Baroque Northern Europe, Funerary art, Early Modern Art and Visual Culture, History of the Low Countries, Burgundian Netherlands, Burgundian Court, Tombs, Netherlands, 16th and 17th century Dutch and Flemish Art, Genius, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Jan Van Scorel, Margaret of Austria, Genius loci, Jan Gossart, Jan Gossaert, Funerary Monuments, Desiderius Erasmus, Humanism (15th-17th c.), Burgundian Court Culture, Janus Secundus, Early Modern Netherlandish Art, Saint Denis, Transi tombs, and Gerardus Geldenhouwer
Research Interests: Mimesis, Renaissance Studies, History of Natural History, Renaissance Art, Early Modern Europe, and 27 moreEmblem studies, Friendship Studies, Natural History, Northern Renaissance, Bird (Ornithology), Friendship, Animals in Culture, Northern Renaissance Art, Renaissance emblematics, Art, Miniature Painting, Owls, Natural history collections, Early Modern Art and Visual Culture, Emblematic studies, Early Modern Art, 16th and 17th century Dutch and Flemish Art, Hieronymus Bosch, Dutch and Flemish Art, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Raptors and owls, Konrad Gesner, Abraham Ortelius, Joris Hoefnagel, Emblematic, Conrad Gesner, Jheronimus Bosch, and Alba Amicorum
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Research Interests: Renaissance Studies, History of Natural History, Renaissance Art, Early Modern Europe, History of The Netherlands, and 9 moreArt and Science, Renaissance Cartography, 16th Century Netherlandish Art, Collecting and Collections, History of Collecting, Early Modern Collecting, Vienna School of Art History, Court of Rudolf II, and Joris Hoefnagel
Research Interests: Print Culture, Renaissance Studies, Renaissance Art, Reformation Studies, Early Modern Europe, and 8 more16th Century Netherlandish Art, Northern Renaissance, 17th Century Netherlandish Art, Early Netherlandish Painting, Early Modern print culture, Northern Renaissance Art, German Renaissance Art, and Erwin Panofsky
A review essay of "De Ontdekking van het dagelijks leven: Van Bosch tot Bruegel," eds. Peter van der Coelen and Friso Lammertse (Rotterdam 2015), and "Verkehrte Welt: Das Jahrhundert von Hieronymus Bosch," eds. Franz Wilhem Kaiser and... more
A review essay of "De Ontdekking van het dagelijks leven: Van Bosch tot Bruegel," eds. Peter van der Coelen and Friso Lammertse (Rotterdam 2015), and "Verkehrte Welt: Das Jahrhundert von Hieronymus Bosch," eds. Franz Wilhem Kaiser and Michael Philipp (Hamburg 2016)