Michael Zell

Michael Zell is a scholar of seventeenth-century Dutch art, with a particular focus on Rembrandt and Vermeer, and teaches European art of the Baroque period, including Global Baroque. He is the author and co-editor of five books and has published numerous articles and essays on a range of topics within early modern Dutch art. His monograph Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) explores the interaction between Dutch gift culture and art, demonstrating how the symbolic economy of the gift mingled with the growing dimension of commerce in Dutch artistic culture. Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (University of California Press, 2002) relates a theological shift in Rembrandt’s biblical art of the 1650s to his illustration of a Jewish text by Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel in 1655. His co-edited volumes include The Affective and Hermeneutic Functions of the Mindful Picture, 1500-1700 (Brill, 2026); ‘Ut Pictura Amor’: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500-1700 (Brill, 2017), and Rethinking Rembrandt (Waanders, 2002). He also co-curated the exhibition “Reality and Imagination: Rembrandt and the Jews in the Dutch Republic” for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2025-2026). Among Professor Zell’s recent articles and essays are “Against the Mirror: Indeterminacy and the Poetics of Painting in Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing”; “Painterly Caresses: The Groom, the Mistress, and the Horse in Ter Borch’s Horse Stable”; “Graphic Images: Rembrandt’s Printed Nudes”; “Liedfde baart kunst: Vermeer and the Poetics of Painting”; “Rembrandt’s Gifts: A Case Study of Actor-Network-Theory,” and “A Leisurely and Virtuous Pursuit: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and Landscape Representation in Seventeenth-Century Holland.” He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, two Jeffrey Henderson Senior Fellowships from the BU Center for the Humanities, and a Frank and Lynne Wisneski Award for Excellence in Teaching. Professor Zell serves on the Advisory Council of the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Fulbright National Screening Committee, and served on the Board of Advisors of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art. He received his PhD from Harvard University.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications  

	The Affective and Hermeneutic Functions of the Mindful Picture, 1500–1700, Brill 2026
	“Against the Mirror: Indtereminacy and the Poetics of Paintings in Rembrandt’s “Woman Bathing.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 16:2 (Summer 2024) DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2024.16.2.3
	Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Amsterdam University Press, 2021.
	Ut Pictura Amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500-1700, co-edited with Walter Melion and Joanna Woodall. Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017
	“Graphic Images: Rembrandt’s Printed Nudes,” in The Naked Truth: Drawing from Nude Models in the Golden Age. exhibition catalogue, Rembrandthuis Museum, Amsterdam, 2016, 87-99 and 168-170. also published in a Dutch edition, Rembrandts naakte waarheid: Tekenen naar naaktmodellen in de gouden eeuw
	“Liefde baart kunst: Vermeer’s Poetics of Painting.” Simiolus 35 (2011): 142-164.
	“Rembrandt’s Gifts: A Case Study of Actor-Network-Theory.” JHNA (Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art) 3:2 (2011)
	Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam.Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002.