Marie-Louise Lillywhite

Marie-Louise is the senior tutor of the Middlebury-CMRS Oxford Humanities program and a Fellow by Special Election at Keble College. Prior to working in Oxford, Marie-Louise taught at the History of Art department at the University of Warwick, where she convened the History of Art MA in Venice, a city in which she lived for many years.

For the Middlebury program in Oxford Marie-Louise teaches courses on Art and Censorship (1500-1650) and Art and Religion on the Global Jesuit Missions (1540-1773). Both of these seminars are based around her research interests in global Renaissance and Baroque visual culture. Marie-Louise has published on topics that include aspects of confraternal artistic patronage in early modern Italy, the role of women and daughters in forming alliances between workshops, the limits of artistic liberty in post-Tridentine Venice, and twentieth-century garden design in Sri Lanka. She is the co-editor of Tintoretto: Identity, Practice, Meaning (Viella, 2022) and the author of Reforming Art in Renaissance Venice (Cambridge University Press, 2025). This book explores how artists in Venice articulated belief in the decades following the Reformations, at a time when the significance and power of the sacred image was contested by  Protestants and Catholics.