Medieval and Renaissance masterpieces.(Current and coming)

While on the hunt for artworks in Spain, the first superintendent of art collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, John Charles Robinson, wrote to a colleague in October 1866: "I am very anxious to get authority to buy ... now is the time--this country is in semi-revolution, money has disappeared ... and whatever there is to be sold is in the market for a fraction of what would have been formerly asked." Such was the feverish climate in the world of collecting at this early date. Founded in 1852 as the Museum of Manufactures, the Victoria and Albert (as it has been named since 1899) got an advantageous jump over many other museums around the world in the formation of what is today regarded as an encyclopedic and very important collection of decorative arts.

This is particularly true of objects made during the medieval and Renaissance periods, which found their way to London in the nineteenth century as many European cathedrals, churches, and private collectors were dispersing their artistic holdings and treasuries were being sold off in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. By 1850 large quantities of goldsmiths' work, enamels, ivories, textiles, stained glass, and sculpture were in the inventories of dealers who were eager to sell to fledgling museums and private collectors around the world. Unlike other art institutions in Europe, the Victoria and Albert Museum does not have its foundation in expansive princely collections amassed over several generations by monarchs and noblemen who had unlimited access to craftsmen and artists and whose wealth could fuel seemingly unlimited art purchases. Instead the museum has relied on gifts, bequests, and the availability of government money to underwrite acquisitions for what is now a collection of more than four million objects.

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Over the last decade or so, the museum has been systematically renovating, restoring, and reinstalling the collections in its beautiful nineteenth-century building in South Kensington. It has just embarked on the restoration of its series of medieval and Renaissance galleries and has taken the opportunity to feature some of its most important holdings in a ...