Quality | 2009.12.10
In this mist of antique loveliness, the object is all. For history go elsewhere | Simon Jenkins
I regard the magnificent new show at the V&A as essentially a taster – an invitation to voyage back from Kensington to origin
Every morning Britain\'s museum curators go down on their knees and pray: "Lord, save me from temptation. Let me not become a theme park." None does. The Almighty is merciful.
This week a new £30m museum – it is nothing less – opened within the Victoria and Albert in London to house a portion of its hoard of medieval and Renaissance objects. They glow, glitter, shimmer and dazzle, outshining such rivals as the Metropolitan in New York, the Cluny in Paris, the British Museum in Bloomsbury.
From Leonardo\'s notebook to Donatello\'s crucifixion, from the boar hunt tapestry to Giambologna\'s Samson Slaying a Philistine , the V&A can lay claim to be the outstanding showcase of pre-modern European antiquities (pre-1600). In Britain\'s hour of fiscal darkness it shows that the nation can still put on a stunning show, and at less than the cost of one lane of an Olympic pool .
The V&A\'s great central court is laid out as an Italian piazza, lined with statues and tombs, over which hovers a Renaissance screen from a Dutch cathedral. Beyond lies a cluster of Gothic effigies and altarpieces with, in the distance, the sanctuary of Florence\'s chapel of Santa Chiara. Flanking rooms drip with the riches of Europe, as if the curators of the V&A had been on a Napoleonic looting expedition. Stained glass torn from Low Country churches radiates with cleverly directed daylight. Florence is again denuded, this time of the Annunciation from the church of Santa Maria Maggiore.
Fine-tooled suits of armour – described as "a cross between a Savile Row suit and a sports car" – jostle with a Tintoretto self-portrait, a Medici study , the Gloucester gold candlestick , the Becket casket and a Veit Stoss boxwood Virgin "clothed with the sun". The pages of Leonardo\'s notes, with translations of each page, can be turned by computer. Display cases are near invisible and works are at eye level, enabling the viewer to study the thread of a quilt or the glint of stained glass. It is admirably done.
There is, of course, no hint of a theme or a park in sight. There is no setting, no medieval chamber, no Renaissance wall or ceiling, cloister or loggia. This is the "new museum" in all its splendour. The object is all. The dominant colour is white. Context is left to book-learning and a cultured imagination. To the casual observer there is little after the dark ages to indicate chronology or narrative, apart from occasional vague headings such as "splendour and society" or "art and ideas".
No distinction is drawn between countries of origin, rather the stress is on the unity of European culture. The result can seem intellectually confusing, a jumble of imagery, half-Christian, half-classical in derivation, with no roots in time or place. The best response is to close down the brain and drift through a mist of antique loveliness.
The obvious reservation was put to me by a German visitor, an art dealer, who was fuming with rage. It was all too clinical. "Where is the atmosphere?" he cried. "Where is the sense of mystery of the middle ages? Why is everything of white stone? You could remove the objects and replace them with beds, and it would be a good hospital."
I restrained from the theme park response, and protested merely that the V&A was a museum, not a medieval church or renaissance palace. He said that was no excuse. The Cloisters in Manhattan had more soul. Historical works of art should be given some context and setting.
Certainly the new galleries contrast with the British historical collection on the other side of the V&A. Here objects are displayed in semi-enclosed spaces, conveying something of the intimacy in which they were enjoyed. The atmosphere is interior, that of corridors, chambers and chancels. There is darkness and detachment from the world outside.
To go from one side of the V&A to the other is thus an aesthetic shock – like passing from the classical side of Oxford\'s Ashmolean museum to its pristine new wing. There is no point in saying one is "better" than the other. The concept of a museum is artificial, with objects removed for purposes of study and display from their previous settings, and set on pedestals, literal and metaphorical. Fashion in museum presentation is always changing, and each era is different.
I share my German acquaintance\'s view that the new V&A is glaringly modernist, more than honouring the curators\' message that the middle ages were not just about dirt, death and plague. There is something absurd in Paul Pindar\'s wooden house front , torn from its Bishopsgate birthplace and fastened high and alone on a brick wall to form a Golgotha of gaunt, blackened timbers, stripped of meaning. If the V&A can dress its objects in glass panels, steel rails and computer screens, then why not the gothic chambers of Cluny or enfilades of the Louvre, where tapestries, corbels and sculptures sit more easily on the eye? Why not a note of music?
I am sure the V&A regards this as theme-park talk. It suggests Ruskin\'s much-ridiculed nervousness that he might find Venice "so beautiful and so strange as to forget the darker truths of its history and being". Medieval beauty might indeed have been created amid violence and squalor, but how to convey this without lurching into ersatz Disneyland? Most of these works were owned by an ecclesiastical or political elite, but to enjoy them we need not invoke the Black Death or the massacre of St Bartholomew\'s Day. The historian Francis Haskell wrote of the danger of reading too much meaning into the "deceptive evidence of art".
This risks demanding a certificate in art history as admission into this exhibition. A more constructive response is that a museum cannot do everything. It is just a museum, an aesthetic orphanage of things lost, looted, bought, restored, analysed and pushed on stage for all to see. It is not a lesson in history or geography.
For those who prefer their relics of medieval and Renaissance Europe fixed in architectural time and place there is no lack of opportunity. For all the horrors which the 20th century inflicted on Europe\'s past, the continent remains the last on earth where respect is shown by authority for historic buildings, for extant reminders of the past.
Many have been defaced. I still wince to see objects that have been wrenched from old churches and carted off to museums. Will Venice one day reclaim the Madonna della Misericordia, hacked from an oratory in the 19th century and hailed on its arrival at the V&A as "a page torn from history"? But these things rarely happen today. The setting of medieval and renaissance Europe lives on in the cathedrals and churches of England, in the ancient cities of Italy, the walled towns of south-west France and the palaces of the Rhine and Danube. The V&A should supply a map showing where its exhibits can still be seen as once displayed.
I regard this magnificent show as essentially a taster, an invitation to voyage back from object to origin, from esoteric South Kensington to places beyond its imprisoning walls, where Europe\'s culture roams free in ancient streets and buildings, in the wood, brick and stone of history.
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