Louisa McKenzie

Bio

An art historian, Louisa’s academic work centres on the devotional art and material culture of late medieval and Renaissance Europe, with a particular focus on Italy. Broadly speaking, her research focuses on intersections between materials, iconography and meaning, and she is particularly interested in how workshop organisation and practice relate to technical and aesthetic exchanges across media. She has experience of teaching history of art, palaeography and language skills, and digital humanities techniques. In addition to works under peer review, Louisa also writes on arts, history and culture topics for a general audience. She is a regular contributor to The Times, and has also created content for, among others, Art UK, the Wellcome Collection and Apollo Magazine.

Trained with a Theology degree from KCL and an MA in Art History from UCL, she holds an MA in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture and a PhD (2023) in History of Art, both from the Warburg Institute.

Research

Louisa’s current project re-evaluates the place of wax sculpture in the wider fine and decorative arts of fifteenth-century Florence. This will be the subject of her first monograph, Re-materialising the Florentine Wax Ex-Voto, forthcoming with De Gruyter Brill. 

A key aspect of Louisa’s work is an interest in materiality and its implications for how objects were perceived and used. As such, she co-founded the ongoing lecture and seminar series, A Material World, which focuses on the reconstruction of life in the past through objects and materials, the people who made them and the people who used them.
 

Teaching

Louisa has taught Latin Palaeography for beginners alongside Prof. Charles Burnett as Postgraduate Teaching Assistant and acted as guest lecturer on the MA module Renaissance Sculpture in the Expanded Field. She was recently Postgraduate Teaching Assistant at UCL for a second-year undergraduate core module in History of Art. In the 2024/2025 academic year, she will lead a session of the Methods and Techniques of Scholarship course on digital methods, alongside Nessa Malone, Assistant Librarian, E-resources, and will convene the upcoming short course Painting Icons: A History of the Portrait from Byzantium to Basquiat (April 2025). 

Publications

Public History of Art: 

Find details of Louisa's latest publications for a general audience, here.
 

Peer-reviewed books:

Re-materialising the Florentine Wax Ex-Voto: Production, Acquisition and Use between 1300 and 1500 (Berlin: De Gruyer Brill, 2025). 

Peer-reviewed Book Chapters:

Mapping wax: locations, contexts and networks of wax workshops in quattrocento Florence. In: Artists, Assistants and Workshop Practices in the Renaissance, ed. L. Goodson, M. Kwakkelstein and M. O’Malley (Leiden: Brill, 2025).
 

Peer-reviewed Articles:

“‘This hall has the look of a city’: Display Strategies for Wax Ex-Votos and Botticelli’s Compositions for the Adoration of the Magi”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 88.1 (2025), pages tbc.

‘“Germinabit sicut lilium”: order politics, self-visualisation, and the commission for Neri di Bicci's San Giovanni Gualberto Enthroned.’ Under review.

‘Making yourself in wax: the metamorphic potential of the wax ex-voto.’ In: Transformative Bodies in the Premodern World: Experiences and Materials, special issue tbd, ed. M. Heilskov and Z. Sarnecka (date tbd). In progress.
 

Reviews:

Review of: N. Degen, Merchants of Style: Art and Fashion After Warhol (London: Reaktion, 2023), ISBN: 978-1789146691. The Burlington Magazine, April 2024, pp. 435-36

Andy Warhol’s textiles are finally back in fashion. Review of the exhibition ‘Andy Warhol: The Textiles’ at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London. Apollo Magazine (online). 25 April 2023.

Book Chapters:

The lonely demise of Benedict Arnold. In: Marylebone Lives: Rogues, Romantics and Rebels, ed. M. Riddaway and C. Upsall (London: Spiramus, 2015), pp. 17-20.

The ghost of Sarah Siddons. In: Marylebone Lives: Rogues, Romantics and Rebels, ed. M. Riddaway and C. Upsall (London: Spiramus, 2015), pp. 54-56.