Professor Alexander Marr
- Head of Department
- Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art (*not currently accepting PhD students)
- Fellow and Dean of Discipline of Trinity Hall
- Director of Studies at Gonville & Caius College
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About
Alexander Marr is Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art. He specializes in European art ca. 1450-ca. 1800, especially its intellectual and literary aspects in their social contexts. His most recent publication is Holbein's Wit: Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art (2026).
Before coming to Cambridge, he taught at the University of Southern California and the University of St Andrews. From 2014 to 2019 he was Director of the project Genius before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art & Science, funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant. His awards include a Paul Mellon Centre Senior Fellowship, the Robert H. Smith Residency at the V&A, and a Philip Leverhulme Prize. He was the founding Director of Cambridge’s CVC and has directed research projects at CRASSH, the DAAD-Cambridge Hub for German Studies, and the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
Marr is Fellow and Dean of Discipline at Trinity Hall. He is a Trustee of the Walpole Society and President of the Leonardo da Vinci Society: a learned society dedicated to the study of art and science from the Renaissance to the present day. Further information may be found at his personal website.
Research
- Current research: Manet and 'Old Master' painting; Velazquez and 'blankness'
- European art ca. 1450-ca. 1800.
- Art and architectural theory.
- Renaissance humanism.
- Philology, word history, and history of concepts (especially those concerning creativity).
- History of science, particularly the mathematical arts.
- History of books and reading.
Recent work has been on Holbein, Dürer, Rubens, Massys, Erasmus, Thomas More, Urs Graf, Niklaus Manuel. Flemish art (especially in Antwerp). Wit and artistic play.
Graduate Students:
* Not currently taking PhD students
Recent and current PhD students' topics include:
- Seventeenth-century Flemish Landscape
- Heroic Masculinity in Early Modern Spanish Painting
- Botanical Symbolism in German Renaissance Portraiture
- Armour and Culture in Early Modern Germany
- The Early Modern Heraldic Imagination
I am Director of Studies in History of Art at Gonville & Caius College. Prospective undergraduates may consult the college's website for further details.