The Victoria & Albert Revisited (in 6.5 hours)

As I said in the previous post, we started the day at the Natural History Museum, intending to spend at least half a day there and then to do a quick revisit of the V&A. However, after 90 minutes we escaped and sought refuge in the V&A, which was gloriously free of small children. So harrowing was our Natural History experience that we required immediate sustenance, so we went to the cafeteria, Sara for her usual roast pork dinner with crackling, and me for chicken pot pie with a nice puff pastry crust. This was the room in which we ate:

Amply fortified, we headed to the Mediaeval galleries. Which were vast.

As at the Natural History Museum, people love to pose with stuff. Someone actually posed in front of the huge funeral monument below, carefully arranging her hair before her father took the picture.

The apostles pray for Reactine during pollen season:

One of the cool things about the V&A is the different ways they display beautiful things:


Yet more beautiful stained glass ( they also have a whole gallery of stained glass elsewhere in the museum); this c.1520 window from Cologne shows Old Testament husband and wife Tobias and Sara, who had to wait three days to consummate their marriage, probably because the dog kept getting in the way:

Another thing I love about the V&A is the huge stuff they display. This is a whole staircase from an early 16th-century house in Brittany:

Here's the facade of a London mansion built in 1600 and demolished in 1890. Below it is a picture of the house taken in 1869:


They have littler stuff too, but when they do, it's usually in bulk. Here's a wall o' heads:

And some devil-headed horse-tethering rings from 15th-century Italy:

And then you have your mid-sized stuff. I think this 16th century Italian sculpture looks a lot like Phyllida Law, Emma Thompson's mother:

Man, I love the V&A. At some point we had to re-fortify so we went back to the cafeteria for tea, coffee, and a slice of Victoria sponge. Then we headed out into the courtyard:

We encountered these little plaques that we had missed first time around:

Then we walked through the galleries we went to last time, and noticed some more stuff we hadn't seen. This series of mosaics celebrates a bunch of artists.

My favourite is Grinling Gibbons, who sounds as if he should be a master at Hogwarts, but who was in fact a 17th-century sculptor and wood carver who carved some impressive decorative panelling in Hampton Court, etc. Apparently he carved himself a lace cravat with which he fooled a lot of people as a practical joke.

Then we found a couple of galleries we hadn't even noticed before, like the glass galleries. These pictures represent just a soupcon of the glass galleries (small stuff in bulk again):



The V&A is the museum of excess. And classification. A librarian's dream.

And then we went back to our favourite gallery, the Cast Courts, and I posed in front of the top half of the cast of Trajan's Column (see the bottom half behind), but I didn't have to arrange my hair first: