In a letter written from Spain in 1866, the renowned Victoria and Albert Museum curator John Charles Robinson wrote: “I am very anxious to get authority to buy. Now is the time — this country is in semirevolution, money has disappeared, distress prevails and whatever there is to be sold is selling for a fraction of what would have been formerly asked. This morning I bought a superb 16th-century chalice for little more than the value of the silver.”
This extract helps to explain why the new £30 million Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, designed by the British architects MUMA, will be the best of their kind in the world. Although prickly and highly strung, Robinson was a dab hand at foraging for art in times of political turmoil: he had been in Italy in 1860 during Garibaldi’s wars of independence, and wrote to his wife to describe being escorted at night by papal dragoons “with our revolvers ready in our hands”. On that trip, acquisitions included a complete Renaissance chapel from a Florentine church. It is the only chapel to have left Italy, and now we can walk right inside it, which is both breathtaking and moving.
It wasn’t only bravery and political opportunism that helped the V&A to forge ahead. By far the most important ingredients were a grand vision and expertise. The museum had been founded using the profits of the Great Exhibition of 1851, with the patriotic purpose of improving British design. This was thought to lag behind that of the French and Germans; the ubiquitous willow pattern design was a byword for bad British taste. It became the world’s first museum of applied and decorative arts, and offered exhibitions with catalogues, instruction in drawing, a library, long opening hours and the first museum caf?. For at least a decade after its founding in 1852 the V&A had little competition for acquisitions, but its brilliant success meant that would-be V&As were soon popping up around the world.
Under its director, Henry Cole, it rapidly built up an unrivalled collection of originals and copies of “approved” models. Examples of bad modern design were put in a “chamber of horrors”. The designer Christopher Dresser recalled seeing “scissors formed as birds ... egg-cups formed as birds’ nests; carpets on which ponds of water were drawn with water lilies floating upon them”. In Dickens’s weekly magazine Household Words, a Mr Crumpet of Brixton is mortified to discover the atrociousness of his own taste. Visitors from all classes were encouraged: the “shaggy and filthy” urchin who diligently draws the medieval Gloucester Candlestick in A. S. Byatt’s novel The Children’s Book is not entirely fanciful.
Although most of the initial acquisitions were contemporary, medieval and especially Renaissance art quickly became central to the V&A’s cause, because the great artists of that time had also been brilliant designers and craftsmen who worked in a wide range of media. Robinson claimed that while 19th-century sculptors were concerned with making marble and bronze statues of the human figure, Renaissance sculptors such as Donatello and Michelangelo also designed friezes and architectural ornament. Raphael became the V&A’s emblematic painter-designer after the permanent loan from Queen Victoria of his seven colossal cartoons for tapestries.
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Raphael also designed “grotesque” decoration while his engravings were used as models by the painters of majolica pottery. You would have never known this from a visit to the National Gallery, Louvre or Uffizi, where Raphael was simply an easel painter. These holistic and frankly Utopian notions about art production would become the guiding principle of the Arts and Crafts movement — William Morris designed its Green Dining Room in 1865.
In the past, the V&A tended to exhibit works either by medium, technique, nationality or style. The ten new galleries are roughly chronological, starting with the fall of the Roman Empire (and the rise of Christianity), and ending in 1600 at the start of the scientific revolution. They are arranged by broad thematic categories from “Faith and Empires 300-1250” to “A World of Goods 1450-1600”. There are about 1,800 objects ranging in size from the façade of a flashy, timber-framed London merchant’s house to a silver nail parer/ear pick with the inscription “IHS (Jesus)”. The exhibits come mainly from Europe and the Mediterranean, but there are fine examples of Arab and oriental artefacts, especially textiles, which had a huge influence on European design. The V&A’s celebrated manuscript copy of an illustrated Italian treatise on the potter’s art (c 1558) features Turkish interpretations of Chinese designs.
Peta Motture, the chief curator, believes that there are many lessons for today’s designers and artists: “The potter Grayson Perry appropriates the designs of other artists, and this is just what they did in the Renaissance. We still decorate our functional objects to make them talking points.”
Indeed, there is a long history of artists finding inspiration here: a Renaissance Madonna and Child relief is currently displayed alongside Henry Moore’s student copy, and Eric Gill, whose religious carvings and inscriptions are at the Royal Academy, was a regular visitor. But it’s not just a resource for the art world: “We want to enable people to make all sorts of connections,” Motture says. “Not only are these objects stunningly beautiful in their own right, they were often imbued with other functions at the same time. So we have rings that are both jewellery to show off in and which have talismanic associations. Rings perform similar functions today. Superstition is in our psyche.”
Previously the museum lacked the environmental controls that would allow it to incorporate textiles and works on paper in mixed-media displays. Now it has several huge tapestries (then the most expensive of portable artefacts) and a Leonardo notebook. There is also a remarkable survival from Egypt: an 8th-century linen and wool tunic that was used to dress a corpse before burial. A replica has been made (minus the stains from body fluids) that can be tried on by visitors.
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The largest and most spectacular gallery is The Renaissance City 1350-1600, which features large-scale works that might be seen in churches, squares, courtyards and gardens. These attest to the personal ambition of patrons and artists, and to civic pride. No self-respecting Italian Renaissance city was without a spectacular fountain and provision of water for these structures was a major engineering feat. Fountains were also vital resources because people drew water from them. Here we have a working fountain presided over by a languid statue of Narcissus, which was bought as a Michelangelo but is now regarded as a 16th-century reworking of an antique fragment. Finest of all is Giambologna’s Samson and the Philistine (1560-62), the centrepiece of a moralising fountain in the herb garden of Francesco de’ Medici’s Florentine palace, which was acquired in 1952.
At almost 7ft high, it is the finest Renaissance statue to have left Italy, apart from Michelangelo’s Louvre slaves. Samson, a bearded, middle-aged athlete, stands astride a lithe Philistine youth and yanks his head back by the hair with his left hand while his right arm is raised to strike with the machete-like jawbone. Both are nude, and their twisting muscular bodies are intricately entwined in a kind of dance macabre. It is a technical tour de force with deep undercutting of the marble that seems to threaten the sculpture’s stability. Another major innovation is that it is designed to look great from any side, not just from the front. It has become a cult gay icon because of the beauty of the bodies and because, when viewed from a particular angle, the Philistine appears to perform a sex act on Samson.
There are, of course, conspicuous absences from these displays, due mostly to the accident of survival. There is almost nothing of the material culture of ordinary people, even though they experienced at first hand everything in the public domain. Their utensils, furnishings and clothes have long since crumbled to dust. The closest we get is a badly damaged hand-coloured woodcut of the Virgin and Child that would have been pinned up in the home. Furniture, too, is thin on the ground, because people had less of it and because it is discarded when damaged or outmoded.
When all is said and done, the great age of the artist-craftsman was not a great age of comfort. Wooden stools, benches, backless “x”-framed chairs, and armless straight-backed chairs were the order of the day. Renaissance bottoms and backs were evidently made of sterner stuff, as we see from a Venetian hall chair, acquired by Robinson in 1860. The carved and gilded walnut is lovely, but you wouldn’t be able to perch on it for long. Upholstery was an 18th-century invention that became ubiquitous in the 19th. Still, you imagine that the lack of creature comforts was an added attraction to those tireless, hyperactive missionaries who founded the V&A. Their favourite period made no concessions to the couch potato. Modern Mr Crumpets, beware.
James Hall is an art critic and historian. His most recent book is The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art (OUP Oxford, £16.99)