Dr Vicky Avery
BA, PhD (Cantab)
Room F45 Millburn House | Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:30 - 2:30pm, Fridays 1:00 - 2:00pm
email: victoria.avery@warwick.ac.uk
Research Interests | Publications
Warwick-Newberry Initiative 2009-10
Louise Bourdua and Vicky Avery are leading the Italian Art History strand of a new cycle of Warwick-Newberry initiatives on "Renaissance and Early Modern Communities in a Transatlantic Perspective", generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Scheduled events include two workshops (at Warwick on Friday and Saturday 30-31 October 2009, and Warwick in Venice on 6-7 April 2010, and a residential summer school at Warwick in Venice, 19-31 July 2010. Interested participants (postgraduates and postdoctoral fellows) from the UK and the Newberry Consortium of North American universities should email Jayne Brown, Secretary of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance.
Broadly speaking, I am interested in all aspects of Italian Renaissance art and theory, but especially in the sculpture, painting, architecture and decorative arts of quattrocento and cinquecento Venice.
I have spent the last few years conducting extensive archival research into the bronze industry of Renaissance Venice and its products (sculptures, works of art, artefacts, bells and artillery). I am interested in issues relating to the commissioning, production, marketing, use, display, reception, collecting, faking and recycling of Venetian Renaissance bronzes. I have published a couple of articles on Venetian Renaissance foundry practice in general, and am now writing a monograph on the subject, which will be published by the British Academy in 2007.
I am also interested in the technical, stylistic and theoretical analysis and interpretation of Venetian Renaissance sculpture in general. Issues of particular interest include: circumstances of commission and manufacture; visual sources and the influence exerted by certain pieces of sculpture; links with painting and architecture; sculpture’s role in State ceremonial; display, reception and ownership. My doctoral dissertation (Cambridge, 1996) re-examined the sculptural output of Alessandro Vittoria (1524/25-1608). I have published widely on various aspects of Vittoria’s oeuvre, and am in the process of preparing a full-scale critical monograph on his life and work, complete with catalogue raisonné and documentary appendix.
I would be delighted to hear from you if you are interested in pursuing postgraduate research in these or related areas.
Forthcoming:
Vulcan’s Forge in Venus’ City: The Production of Bronze Objects in Renaissance Venice (British Academy: London, c. 2007)
‘Alessandro Vittoria’s Socles: Shaping and Naming’ to be published in the proceedings of the conference Sculpture and the Pedestal, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 10 June 2003 (c. September 2006)
‘The Commissioning, Manufacture, Display and Reception of Bronze Busts in Renaissance Venice and Padua’ to be published in the proceedings of the conference Kopf und Büste, The Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, December 2004 (c. September 2006)
Books:
Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Gli Ori: London, 2002) (with technical appendix by Jo Dillon)
Chapters in Books:
‘”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 M. Gaier, B. Nicolai and T. Weddigen (eds), Der Unbestechliche Blick. Festschrift zu Ehren von Wolfgang Wolters Zu seinem siebzigsten Geburtstag (Porta Alba Verlag: Trier 2005), pp. 437-63
‘State and Private Bronze Foundries in Cinquecento Venice: New Light on the Alberghetti and di Conti Workshops’ in P. Motture (ed.), Large Bronzes in the Renaissance, Studies in the History of Art 64, Symposium Papers XLI (CASVA, National Gallery of Art: Washington, D.C., 2003), pp. 241-75
‘Alessandro Vittoria: The Michelangelo of Venice?’ in F. Ames-Lewis and P. Joannides (eds), Reactions to the Master: Michelangelo’s Effect on Art and Artists in the Sixteenth Century (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2003), pp. 157-79
‘Nuove Fonti Archivistiche per il Rinnovo Cinquecentesco della Cappella del Rosario ai Santi Giovanni e Paolo’ in L. Finocchi-Ghersi (ed.), Alessandro Vittoria e l’Arte Veneta della Maniera (Forum: Udine, 2001), pp. 175-97
‘La Bottega di Alessandro Vittoria’ and ‘Alessandro Vittoria Collezionista’ in A. Bacchi, L. Camerlengo and M. Leithe-Jasper (eds), “La Bellissima Maniera”: Alessandro Vittoria e la Scultura Veneta del Cinquecento (exhibition catalogue: Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trent, 1999), pp. 126-39; and 140-51 respectively
Articles:
‘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
‘The House of Alessandro Vittoria Reconstructed’, Sculpture Journal, V (2001), pp. 7-32
‘Documenti sulla Vita e Opere di Alessandro Vittoria’, Studi Trentini di Scienze Storiche, Sezione I, LXXVIII, Supplemento (1999), pp. 175-388
