Dr Victoria Avery

Keeper European Sculpture & Decorative Arts

Victoria Avery (BA, PhD, Cantab) is now Keeper European Sculpture & Decorative Arts at the Museum, where she has worked since 2010. Prior to which she was Associate Professor in the History of Art Department, University of Warwick (2005-10) and Rush H. Kress Fellow at Villa I Tatti (Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; 2004-05).

She has researched, lectured and published extensively on Italian Renaissance sculpture, most recently co-authoring with Paul Joannides, A Michelangelo Discovery (2015). She was awarded the Premio Salimbeni 2012 for her British Academy-funded monograph, Vulcan’s Forge in Venus’ City: The Story of Bronze in Venice, 1350-1650 (2011).

She has also published on various aspects of the applied arts, including the co-authored Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition catalogue, Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (2015).

She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and sits on the Advisory Council of VISTAS (Virtual Images of Sculpture in Time And Space, 1250-1780), the editorial board of Ricche Minere, and the Art Advisory Committee of Ely Cathedral.

Publications

2016: Victoria Avery, ‘Material matters: bronze and its (non)-employment in the funerary monuments of Venice’s Doges, 1475-1625’, in Benjamin Paul (ed.), Doges’ Tombs/Tombe Dogali, (Rome: Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani, forthcoming)

2015: A Michelangelo Discovery: The Rothschild bronzes and the case for their proposed attribution (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum), co-edited with Paul Joannides

2015: Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (London: Philip Wilson), co-edited with Melissa Calaresu and Mary Laven

2015: ‘ “belo et onorato per onor ancho suo”: Alessandro Vittoria’s Zane Altar Reconsidered’ in Carlo Corsato and Deborah Howard (eds), Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari: Immagini di Devozione, Spazi della Fede / Devotional Spaces, Images of Piety (Padua: Centro Studi Antoniani), pp. 233-49

2015: ‘Alessandro Vittoria and the Art of Carving’, in Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio (ed.), Making and Moving Sculpture in Early Modern Italy (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate), pp. 87-110

2013: ‘Campane, Cavedoni, Candelieri and Caramali: Giacomo Calderari (c.1562–1622), bell-maker and bronze-caster of Venice’, in Peta Motture, Emma Jones & Dimitrios Zikos (eds), Carvings, Casts and Collectors: The Art of Renaissance Sculpture, ed. (London: V&A; 2nd ed. 2014), pp. 236-51

2013: ‘ “Due incomparabili donzelle”: Catarina and Anna Castelli, Sister Bell-Makers in Eighteenth-Century Venice’, in Machtelt Israëls and Louis A. Waldman (eds), Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, 2 vols (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore), vol. I, pp. 654-70