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 University Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art. He specializes in European art 1400-1800, especially its intellectual and literary aspects in their social contexts. His most recent publication is Holbein's Wit: Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art.
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 Visual Culture (CVC). In 2024, he delivered the Pharos Lectures at the University of Oxford.
Marr is Fellow and Dean of Discipline at Trinity Hall. Further information may be found at his personal website.
Research
- Current research:
- A monograph with the working title Matter and Imagination in Northern Renaissance Art, treating knots, liquidity, and polishing in artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Urs Graf, Niklaus Manuel, and Ludger tom Ring the Younger
- Velazquez and the hunt
- Manet and emulation
- Broader research topics include:
- Renaissance humanism and the visual arts
- Philology, word history, art theory, and history of concepts (especially those concerning creativity)
- History of science, particularly the mathematical arts
- History of books and reading