Holly Trusted

Holly Trusted (publishing as Marjorie Trusted) is a historian of British and Spanish sculpture. Previously Senior Curator of Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum she is known in particular for her work on British and Spanish sculpture and was the lead curator for the Victoria and Albert Museum Cast Courts. Since January 2019, Trusted is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Trusted was Honorary Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries of London 2018-19.

Trusted was educated at The Maynard School, Exeter and left in 1973. She gained her BA and MA at the University of Cambridge followed by her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Trusted joined the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1979 where she worked on British and Spanish sculpture as well as extensively on European decorative arts in the V&A collection such as ambers, ivories, and medals. As Senior Curator of Sculpture, Trusted was the lead curator for the redevelopment of the V&A Cast Courts, which opened in 2018. She gave the keynote lecture at The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA, Brussels) conference Uniqueness and Multiplication: Plaster as an Art Material in October 2017 on the Cast Courts project.

From January 2019, Trusted has become an Honorary Senior Research Fellow and continues to research and lecture on art history while working on a book on German baroque sculpture. She served on the vetting committee of TEFAF Maastricht in March 2019 for Western Sculptures up to 1830.

In 2008 Trusted jointly curated an exhibition entitled The Return of the Gods at Tate Britain with Tim Knox and Helen Dorey (Sir John Soane’s Museum), and Martin Myrone (Tate Britain). The exhibition was the first in Britain to focus on British neoclassical sculpture. The exhibition included works by Thomas Banks, Antonio Canova, Joseph Nollekens, and Bertel Thorvaldsen.

Trusted's work on the baroque and later ivory collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum led to a major publication in 2013, Baroque & Later Ivories, which was praised in review for its detailed approach to the subject and described as a 'veritable magnum opus'. Trusted's previous work in 2007 on The arts of Spain: Iberia and Latin America 1450-1700 was also praised as "excellent" and "highly reliable".

Trusted was elected a member of the Society of Antiquaries of London in October 1999 and served as Honorary Vice-President in 2018-19. Trusted was the founding editor of The Sculpture Journal in 1997.

Trusted publishes under the name Marjorie Trusted.

• Contributor to A reservoir of Ideas: essays in honour of Paul Williamson (V & A Publications, 2017).
• Contributor to Sculpture victorious: art in an age of invention, 1837-1901 (New Haven: Yale University Press: Yale Center for British Art, 2014).
• Baroque & Later Ivories (V & A Publications, 2013).
• 'Survivors of a Shipwreck: Ivories from a Manila Galleon of 1601' Hispanic Research Journal (2013) 14:5, 446-462.
• with Helen Dorey and Tim Knox The return of the Gods: neoclassical sculpture in Britain (Tate Britain, London, 2008).
• The arts of Spain: Iberia and Latin America 1450-1700 (V & A Publications, 2007).
• The making of sculpture: the materials and techniques of European sculpture (V & A Publications, 2007).
• 'Exotic Devotion: Sculpture in Viceregal America and Brazil, 1520–1820' in Joseph J. Rishel The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2006) 248–257.
• with Diane Bilbey British sculpture 1470 to 2000: a concise catalogue of the collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V & A Publications, 2002).
• Spanish sculpture: catalogue of the post-medieval Spanish sculpture in wood, terracotta, alabaster, marble, stone, lead and jet in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V & A Publications, 1996).
• German Renaissance medals: a catalogue of the collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V & A Publications, 1990).
• Catalogue of European Ambers in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V & A Publications, 1985).