Imagine that you are told that the whole of London is about to be destroyed. The British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, all of the treasures about to be swept away. You’ve got a magic wand and can save just one room. Which would you choose?
Oddly enough, I think I’d chose Gallery 46A at the V&A – the Cast Court – which contains not one original object, but crams into one room an entire art history of almost two millenniums of Europe in a mad, exotic menagerie. There are tombs, fonts, doors, panels, freestanding statues and crosses, portrait busts, monumental memorials. The originals were in bronze, in stone, in wood, but here they are in plaster – that fragile but infinitely malleable magic dough – carefully copied and coloured, preserving every crack and grain, every indentation left by weary buttocks over the ages; not quite real but not quite fake.
So now, Isabella d’Angouleme, Queen of John of England, who died in 1246 and was buried at the Abbey of Fontevrault lies at the foot of Trajan’s Column, which records the Roman Emperor’s campaign against the Dacians.
Arcading from the Porte de La Vierge of the Notre Dame dating back to the early 13th century – bearing the indentations left by those centuries of worshippers is astonishing real, but then so is the nearby Norwegian wood church door (from the church of Al in Hallingdal), a wonderful tangle of foliage and fantastical beast made of much battered but still sturdy “wood”. It dates to about 50 years before the great French cathedral.
And many of the originals of the items here survive only in this ghostly facsimile. In the matching gallery 46B – which contains solely Italian art – including a much gazed-upon David copy – is the bust by Francesco Laurana (1430-1502). The original was destroyed in Berlin in 1945; so this cool sophisticated portrait – which may be of Ippolita Maria Sforza, wife of King Alfonso II of Naples – now stands alone.
Even when originals survive, they’ve often fared worse than their copies in the careful museum care. So the wonderful tympanum from the church of Shobdon in Herefordshire – curiously redolent of African art, and with the stance that reminds me of Sheela-Na-Gigs – is here the true representative of the original. For the church was demolished in the 18th century and this startling figure was re-erected, exposed to the elements – as a garden folly, a condition in which it remains – folly indeed.
Today of course, we are hung up about originality, and some would dismiss mere copies as having very little value indeed. But this is a modern luxury – an effect of extensive cheap printing of colour plates, and air travel and our consequent ability to visit originals in situ. These were luxuries not available in the 1860s when Henry Cole, the museum’s first director, dragooned the crowned heads of Europe into signing an international convention for the exchange of casts.
And who knows if these luxuries will continue to be available. But even if they are, there’s something magical about looking beyond a Bohemian St George driving home his lance into a frankly puny dragon to a Mercury and Psyche dancing in an erotic symphony that was made for an emperor in Rome. That’s something you’ll never see with the originals.
Visiting the V&A – unless you have the luxury of popping in regularly – is an exercise in prioritisation. But these galleries should, I’d suggest, be the first on your list of essentials.
Links: the V&A’s description of the courts; the story of the Trajan’s column casts.
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