Victoria and Albert Museum (Field Trip 5/7/12)

On Thursday we visited the Victoria and Albert Museum. I was really impressed with its comprehensiveness. London already has the massive and globally inclusive British Museum so I didn’t expect the V&A to be just as incredible and all-encompassing. The exterior of the building was beautiful but still had massive craters left by the bombings of World War Two. The Brits’ respect and consideration for the significance of World War Two is one of things I really like about the old buildings in London. It is hard to forget to the impact of such a terribly violent war since so many of the buildings are preserved as such, especially with the inscription given on the V&A:

 The first few sections I visited at the V&A were part of the European Medieval and Renaissance exhibit (300-1500 and then 1350-1600). It was really cool to see artifacts as well preserved as they were. It struck me how intricate these items were – especially the religious items. I noticed incredible intricacy in the design of crosses and monstrances, which I learned are vessels for the Eucharist during communion. The cavernous room that was designed to evoke “the Renaissance city” helped me to imagine the setting for many of Shakespeare’s plays. Many of the structures were taken from Renaissance buildings in Italy. Three of the plays we have read were set at least partially in Italy – The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, and The Taming of the Shrew. We noted a gorgeous bronze door that hailed from a medieval church in Verona, the setting of Romeo and Juliet:

This door depicts scenes from the New Testament. I especially liked how the figures on the door are three dimensional, which has the effect of making them lifelike.

We saw so many wonderful things at the V&A that it is difficult to address them all, so next I will travel to the exhibition that had Shakespearean theater pieces on display, which was the Theatre and Performance section. In this section, there were several items from different productions of Hamlet. One was a skull signed by the Royal Court Theatre production of the play. Another item was a headdress from an interesting interpretation of Hamlet. This Hamlet ballet fashioned the headdress to be part skull and part jester’s hat to evoke both the gravedigger and the dead jester. Because the dance had no dialogue, the producers convey the abstract concepts of the play through the costumes and set.

Despite being exhausted by a nasty cold, I enjoyed my time at the V&A and would like to return before I leave London. I couldn’t taste my eggplant parmesan but it looked delicious. Probably because I was so sick and exhausted, the café was my favorite part of the V&A experience. It was an amazing place. The rooms were richly colored and intricately decorated. I later discovered that these are the original refreshment rooms and form the first museum restaurant in the world. As is appropriate for their claim to be the greatest museum of art and design, they were built to showcase contemporary design and architecture of their time, mid-nineteenth century.