VICTORIA, ALBERT AND SOME GRANDEUR

For all its epic Kensingtonian splendour, the Victoria & Albert Museum can sometimes seem like a vast curiosity shop. Its eclectic collections have few gaps and, as with New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, wandering without purpose can be a bit overwhelming. It is excusable not to have noticed anything was missing, but for the past ten years the Medieval and Renaissance galleries have been closed for a comprehensive £30m restoration. This reinvigorated wing reopened in November as ten refurbished galleries, and the result is splendid.

Two vast central rooms with cathedral-high ceilings elegantly and accessibly showcase a collection that could easily merit a museum of its own. The Santa Chiara chapel, moved from Florence, sits near a Thomas Becket casket from Limoges. Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Forster is exhibited with Donatello’s "Lamentation over the Dead Christ"–I could go on all day, or for a whole lifetime, without doing the riches of these rooms justice.

Given the size of this collection–1,800 objects, spanning almost a millennium and a half–these rooms are not particularly focused. But that’s not the V&A's forte, and any sort of imposed cohesion would have been a shame. Instead the modern, elegant, beautifully lit rooms let the works speak for themselves, often with startling depth and beauty.

Despite London's economic gloom, this seems to be a plush moment for its museums. Exhibitions and restorations commissioned in plumper times are still coming to light, and visitor numbers are at all-time highs. Also on view at the V&A is the excellent "Maharaja" show and now "Decode"–how many institutions can display both the treasures of the post-Murghal empire and the fruits of edgy digital design? The museum is justifiably full of pride at the moment. It would be churlish not to revel in it.

The new Medieval and Renaissance galleries opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum on December 2nd.

~ ED CUMMING

Picture credit: "The return from Egypt, from the Childhood of Christ", Gerhard Rhemish, 1500-1549