{"id":2993,"date":"2010-09-05T13:56:39","date_gmt":"2010-09-05T17:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=2993"},"modified":"2010-09-18T16:44:05","modified_gmt":"2010-09-18T20:44:05","slug":"get-lost-in-the-victoria-and-albert-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2010\/09\/get-lost-in-the-victoria-and-albert-museum\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Lost in the Victoria and Albert Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

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“Eve” by Thomas Brock, 1899<\/a><\/p>\n

Seeing the Victoria and Albert Museum is a must. And you most definitely should enter the museum via the Tube entrance. Prior to my visit, I na\u00efvely believed the Victoria and Albert Museum would display art from Queen Victoria\u2019s reign to illustrate the period\u2014I found myself mistaken. Upon entering V&A from the underground tunnel, I immediately stepped foot into a series of small, dark rooms off to the right. The rooms modestly displayed furniture and tapestries from Europe dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth century. I then wandered into the main museum hallway above ground and explored the diverse assortment of sculptures extending down a long hallway. Taken aback, I quickly realized the V&A actually displayed a much broader range of art. By the end of my visit, I found that was a huge understatement. The Victoria and Albert Museum is enormous and houses a collection of almost every type of visual art.<\/p>\n

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Fashion Exhibit<\/a><\/p>\n

The museum map became somewhat useless and rather bothersome as I wandered through the labyrinth of art. Branching off of the main sculpture room\u2014which included work from a favorite sculptor of mine, Rodin\u2014were displays of art from China, the Islamic Middle East, Japan, Korea, South Asia, and South-East Asia. Another room I thoroughly enjoyed was a room presenting fashions from Italy, the United States, Japan, England, and France. The clothing dated from the eighteenth century through today. I only explored parts of the first floor and I still had five more levels!<\/p>\n

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Plaster-casted Sculpture Exhibit (personal photo)<\/p>\n

Throughout the remainder of my museum tour, I discovered collections of photography, mini architecture models, prints, drawings, paintings, tapestries, sacred silver and gold, and stained glass. There were also two massive rooms of plaster-casted architecture and sculptures dating from the eighteenth century, when plaster-casting famous works was popular for museum displays. Numerous rooms displayed eclectic exhibits of Medieval and Renaissance European art from the fourth to seventeenth century. When I finally stumbled into a dark hidden room of priceless jewelry dating back from 1500 BC, I was irrevocably astounded. I was lost in the Victoria and Albert museum but when discovering all these sorts of extraordinary pieces of art, who didn\u2019t want to be?<\/p>\n

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Stained-glass Exhibit (personal photo)<\/p>\n

On the whole, the museum\u2019s collection was incredible (if that\u2019s not obvious already). I was completely taken aback by the wide array of art displayed, as well as the priceless items included\u2014countless pieces of silver and jewelry, as well as Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s notebooks and Raphael\u2019s paintings (coming soon). However, the organization of the museum is a contentious topic. The pieces of art come from all over the globe and date back to 1500 BC. Also, obviously, the museum includes almost every type of art. To mitigate this challenge of organizing the art, the museum\u2019s ironically set-up like a maze. The different rooms intertwine and lead you through every floor, and each room is included in the art display. For example, doorways to Renaissance Europe boast beautiful marble columns, tiled floors mimic mosaics on display, monolithic architectural structures make Italian plaster-casted sculptures seem authentic, and aged brick walls and cobblestone floors bring life to the medieval ironwork.<\/p>\n

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Large-scale Medieval and Renaissance Architecture (personal photo)<\/p>\n

From what I could gather, it seems as though the Victoria and Albert Museum is a massive collection of treasures donated by organizations and wealthy individuals. For one, the galleries of donated art pieces ostentatiously display the donor\u2019s name on the wall. Overall, the V&A Museum is a display of wealth\u2014both of England\u2019s monetary wealth and of its wealth of knowledge in the arts. The museum has put on display priceless pieces of art from around the world. The English are subtly, but really quite clearly, boasting. Typical.<\/p>\n

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One Exhibit’s Entranceway (personal photo)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Eve” by Thomas Brock, 1899 Seeing the Victoria and Albert Museum is a must. And you most definitely should enter the museum via the Tube entrance. Prior to my visit, I na\u00efvely believed the Victoria and Albert Museum would display art from Queen Victoria\u2019s reign to illustrate the period\u2014I found myself mistaken. Upon entering V&A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":380,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6675,77],"tags":[12,10,1556,1045],"class_list":["post-2993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-maryc","category-museums","tag-art","tag-museum","tag-the-va","tag-the-victoria-and-albert-museum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/380"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2993\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}