Prof Victoria Avery

Keeper European Sculpture & Decorative Arts

Victoria Avery has been Professor of European Sculpture, University of Cambridge, since 2024, and the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Keeper of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, since 2010, prior to which she was Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, University of Warwick. Vicky is an EDI champion and has led the Museum’s Legacies-themed exhibition programme to date. She is currently Lead Curator of Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition (21 February–1 June 2025) and Co-Editor of the exhibition catalogue of the same name (PWP, 2025); she was Co-Curator of Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (8 September 2023–7 January 2024) and Co-Editor of its book (PWP, 2023). She is an active member of the University’s Legacies of Enslavement Network and the Change Makers Action Group. She has spearheaded new research into the presence of Black Georgians and Victorians in Cambridge, focussing on abolitionist Olaudah Equiano and virtuoso violinist George Bridgtower, with new archival-based articles on their Cambridge connections due to be published in 2025.

Vicky’s primary field of expertise is European sculpture from 1400 to the present day, especially that produced in early modern Italy. She has researched, lectured and published widely on all aspects of Italian Renaissance sculpture. Her British Academy sponsored Vulcan’s Forge in Venus’s City: The Story of Bronze in Venice 1350–1650 (OUP, 2011), awarded the Premio Salimbeni in 2012, exemplifies her preferred archival and object-based methodologies. Her interdisciplinary Michelangelo Bronzes Research Project focussed on the authorship, patronage, making and meaning of the Rothschild bronzes, and resulted in Michelangelo: Sculptor in Bronze (PWP, 2018). Vicky’s current European sculptural research interests include: materials and materiality, making and commissioning processes, meanings and iconography, collecting and display, provenance and the sculpture art market.

Vicky also has broad knowledge of and interest in the decorative arts of early modern Europe, especially in terms of making, materiality, usage, collecting and display. She has curated numerous research-led interdisciplinary exhibitions, including Treasured Possessions (2015), Madonnas & Miracles (2017) and Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe (2019–2020). These have resulted in several conferences including, most recently, the CRASSH-funded symposium, Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte (2020), which is being expanded into a multi-author volume, The pineapple from domestication to commodification: Re-presenting a global fruit (Proceedings of the British Academy, 2025).

Vicky lectures and examines regularly for the Department of Art History and Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge as well as undertaking object-based teaching for BA, MA/MPhil degrees in English, Medieval and Modern Languages, Theology, Geography and Law. Vicky will be on sabbatical for three consecutive terms from Michaelmas 2025.

Vicky would welcome applications from prospective MPhil and PhD students whose intended research relates to her current research interests, from Michaelmas 2026 (to coincide with her return from sabbatical): please contact her in advance if you are considering making an application.

Publications

Books (single authored)

Victoria Avery, Vulcan’s Forge in Venus’ City: The Story of Bronze in Venice, 1350–1650 (London: British Academy/OUP, 2011), 496 pages (awarded XXX Premio Salimbeni per la Storia e la Critica d’Arte in 2011)
Victoria Avery, Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (London: Gli Ori, 2002), 341 pages

Books (joint authored)

Victoria Avery and Paul Joannides, A Michelangelo Discovery: The Rothschild bronzes and the case for their proposed attribution (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2015), 83 pages

Edited volumes and exhibition catalogues

Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu (eds), The pineapple from domestication to commodification: Re-presenting a global fruit (Proceedings of the British Academy, forthcoming 2024)
Victoria Avery and Jack Subryan Richards (eds), Black Atlantic: Power, People, Promise (London: PWP/Bloomsbury, 2023), 192 pages
Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu (eds), Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800 (London: Philip Wilson, 2019), 271 pages
Victoria Avery (ed.), Michelangelo Sculptor in Bronze (London: Philip Wilson, 2018), 352 pages
Victoria Avery, Melissa Calaresu and Mary Laven (eds), Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (London: Philip Wilson, 2015), 290 pages
Victoria Avery and Matteo Ceriana, L’Industria artistica del bronzo del Rinasciemento a Venezia e nell’Italia settentrionale (Verona: Scripta, 2007), 479 pages

Refereed papers in journals

Victoria Avery and Emma Jones, ‘Family matters: Jacopo Sansovino’s Monument to Doge Francesco Venier in San Salvador, Venice’, Colnaghi Studies Journal, vol. 8 (March 2021), pp. 88-113
Victoria Avery, ‘Unless they were really first class, I did not care to have them’: Lt Col. Boscawen and his collection of sculpture’, Sculpture Journal, XII (2004), pp. 86-98
Victoria Avery, ‘The House of Alessandro Vittoria Reconstructed’, Sculpture Journal, V (2001), pp. 7-32

Contributions to symposia and compiled volumes (referred* or otherwise)

Victoria Avery and Emma Jones, ‘The Bronzes of San Marco’, in La Basilica di Venezia. San Marco: Arte, Storia, Conservazione, ed. Ettore Vio, 3 vols (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2019), vol. 2, pp. 116-143
Victoria Avery, ‘Introduction’, in Michelangelo Sculptor in Bronze, ed. Victoria Avery (London: Philip Wilson, 2018), pp. 1-7
Victoria Avery, ‘Young Michelangelo, bronze and the David for France’, in ibid., pp. 22-47
Victoria Avery, ‘Michelangelo’s bronze Julius II for Bologna’ in ibid., pp. 48-79
Victoria Avery, ‘Mature Michelangelo and the mastery of metal’ in ibid., pp. 80-105
Victoria Avery and Emma Jones, ‘Sculpture’, in Collecting & Giving: Highlights from the Sir Ivor and Lady Batchelor Bequest (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2018), pp. 72-87
Victoria Avery, ‘The Sculpture of Degas: Production and Reproduction’, in Degas: A Passion for Perfection, ed. Jane Munro (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 184-201
Victoria Avery, ‘Material Matters: Bronze and its (non)-employment in the monuments to Venice’s Doges (1475–1625)’, in The Tombs of the Doges of Venice from the Beginning of the Serenissima to 1907, ed. Benjamin Paul (Rome/Venice: Viella, 2016), pp. 267-310
Victoria Avery, ‘Alessandro Vittoria and the Art of Carving’, in Making and Moving Sculpture in Early Modern Italy, ed. Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio (Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 87-110 [reprinted in paperback by Routledge, 2021]
Victoria Avery, ‘“Belo et onorato per onor ancho suo”: Alessandro Vittoria’s Zane Altar Reconsidered’ in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari: Devotional Spaces, Images of Piety, ed. Carlo Corsato and Deborah Howard (Padua: Centro Studi Antoniani, 2015), pp. 233-49
Victoria Avery, ‘Campane, Cavedoni, Candelieri and Caramali: Giacomo Calderari (c.1562–1622), bell-maker and bronze-caster of Venice’, in Carvings, Casts and Collectors: The Art of Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Peta Motture, Emma Jones and Dimitrios Zikos (London: V&A publishing, 2013; 2nd ed. 2014), pp. 236-251
Victoria Avery, ‘“Due incomparabili donzelle”: Catarina and Anna Castelli, Sister Bell-Makers in Eighteenth-Century Venice’, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, ed. Machtelt Israëls and Louis A. Waldman, 2 vols (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2013), vol. I, pp. 654-70
Victoria Avery, ‘La Cappella del Rosario’, ‘78. Profeti e Sibille’, ‘79. Vittorie e rilievi con cherubini’, ‘80. Episodi della vita della Vergine’, ‘83. San Domenico; Santa Giustina’, ‘84. Candelabri’, ’96. Cancelli’ and ‘97. I ‘frammenti Correr’ in La Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Pantheon della Serenissima. Chiese Veneziane 1, ed. Giuseppe Pavanello (Venice: Marcianum Press, 2013), pp. 284-5, 286-7, 288, 288-9, 291-2, 292-3, 325, and 325-6 respectively
Victoria Avery, ‘I bronzi Zen’, Arte, Storia, Restauri della Basilica di San Marco a Venezia: Da Cappella della Madonna a Cappella Zen. Quaderni della Procuratoria, Anno 2012 (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2012), pp. 72-83
Victoria Avery, ‘“Ridotta à perfettione”: The Rebuilding of the Cappella di San Sabba in Sant’Antonin and Artistic Practice in late Cinquecento Venice’, in Chiesa di Sant’Antonin: storia e restauro, ed. Tiziana Favaro (Venice: Soprintendenza per i beni architettonici e paesaggistici di Venezia e laguna, 2010), pp. 155-179
Victoria Avery, ‘Dalle bocche da fuoco alla vere da pozzo: la produzione artistica dei fonditori d’artigliera di stato nella Venezia del Rinascimento’, in L’Industria Artistica del Bronzo nella Venezia e nell’Italia settentrionale del Rinascimento, ed. Victoria Avery and Matteo Ceriana (Verona: Scripta, 2008), pp. 303-344
Victoria Avery, ‘Virtue, Valour, Victory: The Making and Meaning of Bronze Equestrian Monuments (ca. 1440–ca. 1640)’, in Praemium Virtutis III: Reiterstandbilder von der Antike bis zum Klassizismus. Symbolische Kommunikation und gesellschaftliche Wertesysteme, ed.
Joachim Poeschke, Thomas Weigel and Britta Kusch-Arnhold. Schriftenreihe des Sonderforschungsbereichs 496; vol. 22 (Münster: Rhema, 2008), pp. 199-233
Victoria Avery, ‘Brazen Images and Sounding Brass: The Significance and Use of Bronze in Christian Contexts’, in The Lion Companion to Christian Art, ed. M.P. Brown (Oxford, 2008), pp. 230-31
Victoria Avery, ‘The Production, Display and Reception of Bronze Heads and Busts in Renaissance Venice and Padua: Surrogate Antiques’, in Kopf / Bild. Die Büste in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Jeanette Kohl and Rebecca Müller (Münich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007), pp. 75-112
Victoria Avery, ‘Alessandro Vittoria’s Socles: Shaping and Naming’ in Display and Displacement: Sculpture and the Pedestal from Renaissance to Post-Modern, ed. Alexandra Gerstein (London: Paul Holberton, 2007), pp. 16-32
Victoria Avery, ‘“Giovene di spirito et d’ingegno”: New Light on the Life and Work of the Venetian Renaissance Bronze Caster Marcantonio di Niccolò di Conti (1576-1638)’ in Der Unbestechliche Blick. Festschrift zu Ehren von Wolfgang Wolters Zu seinem siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. M. Gaier, B. Nicolai and T. Weddigen (Trier: Porta Alba Verlag, 2005), pp. 437-63
Victoria Avery, ‘Giovanni Francesco Rustici, Mercury Taking Flight’, in Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and the Renaissance in Florence, ed. David Franklin (exh. cat. National Gallery of Canada with Yale University Press: Ottawa, 2005), pp. 72-73
Victoria Avery, ‘Scultore dell’Italia settentrionale, Tondi bronzei del portale di palazzo Castelli-Prosperi-Sacrati’ in Gli Este a Ferrara: Il Camerino di alabastro: Antonio Lombardo e la scultura all’antica, ed. Matteo Ceriana (exh. cat. Ferrara, 2004), pp. 244-47
Victoria Avery, ‘Alessandro Vittoria, Medal of Francisco de Toledo’; ‘Danese Cattaneo (attributed), Medal of Two Unidentified Young Women’; ‘Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, Moses with the Features of Jupiter Ammon’ in In the Light of Apollo: Italian Renaissance and Greece, ed. Mina Gregori (exh. cat. Athens, 2004), pp. 155-56, 160.
Victoria Avery, ‘Campagna, Girolamo’ and ‘Vittoria, Alessandro’, in The Encyclopedia of Sculpture, ed. Antonia Boström (New York and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), pp. 238-42 and 1736-40 respectively
Victoria Avery, ‘State and Private Bronze Foundries in Cinquecento Venice: New Light on the Alberghetti and di Conti Workshops’ in Large Bronzes in the Renaissance, ed. Peta Motture. Studies in the History of Art 64, Symposium Papers XLI (Washington, D.C.: CASVA, National Gallery of Art, 2003), pp. 241-75
‘Alessandro Vittoria: The Michelangelo of Venice?’, in Reactions to the Master: Michelangelo’s Effect on Art and Artists in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis and Paul Joannides (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 157-79
Victoria Avery, ‘Nuove fonti archivistiche per il rinnovo cinquecentesco della Cappella del Rosario ai Santi Giovanni e Paolo’ in Alessandro Vittoria e l’arte veneta della maniera, ed. Lorenzo Finocchi-Ghersi (Udine: Forum, 2001), pp. 175-97
Victoria Avery, ‘La Bottega di Alessandro Vittoria’ and ‘Alessandro Vittoria collezionista’, in “La bellissima maniera”: Alessandro Vittoria e la scultura veneta del Cinquecento, ed. Andrea Bacchi, Lia Camerlengho and Manfred Leithe-Jasper (exh. cat., Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trent, 1999), pp. 126-39 and 141-51