V&A Medieval and Renaissance Galleries reopening

Old Brick Bridge

The great medieval and Renaissance collections at the V&A Museum present a sweep of European art and craftsmanship from the years 300 to 1600 – and they have been given a right shake-up. A few months ago, when I first visited the site, it looked like nothing so much as a gigantic archaeological dig. Buildings, monuments and statues lay about in pieces. Precious objects took on strange forms in plastic wrappings or wood crates. Careful, don’t trip over the Donatello!

This spectacle was a fragment of a near decade-long transforming exercise affecting 70 per cent of the collections, which is on course to be completed at the end of this year. Mark Jones, the V&A’s director, summarised the aims in a public statement: it is ‘to enable the V&A to claim to be a world-class 21st-century museum with beautiful contemporary displays and a revitalised historic building. Anyone who last visited the V&A before 2001 would find it almost unrecognisable today.’

The reforms started with the British Galleries in 2001, a story I covered for this magazine, and which were succeeded by a redisplay of many of the core collections. The Grand Entrance Hall, the big shop, the cafe and the garden all came in for a new broom. This year has seen the opening, in a fresh site in the building, of the first phase of the reconfigured ceramics collection – an assemblage said to be the world’s most comprehensive – and a newly minted space for theatre and performance.

By far the main museum event of the season will be the revival of the V&A’s Medieval and Renais­sance Galleries, sometimes known on the ground as ‘Medren’. Seven of the years of planning have gone into creating a suite of 10 galleries that occupy an entire wing of the old landmark building designed by the Victorian Aston Webb. New spaces have been created, existing gallery spaces redes­igned and areas previously used as offices turned over to the collections. A treasury of 1,800 objects is shown in a spread of more than 3,520 square feet. A raft of curators, specialists, architects, designers, engineers, lighting experts, conservationists, administrators and educationists have been brought together on a project whose budget has topped £30 million.

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