WHEN it first opened in 1852, the stated mission of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London was to inspire designers, manufacturers and artists of the day. Now, with a brand-new set of galleries, the museum is hoping to inspire visitors by luring them back through the centuries. Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, Gothic altarpieces and a room devoted to the Italian master Donatello are among a feast of treasures on show at the 10 new Medieval and Renaissance galleries at the museum, known locally as the V & A. In all, more than 1,000 years of history — from the fall of the Roman Empire to the end of the Renaissance — are surveyed in the galleries, which span three floors and more than 35,000 square feet in the east wing of the museum. Built at a cost of £31.75 million (about $50 million) over seven years, the galleries feature 1,800 pieces, shown both thematically and chronologically. The opening represents the completion of the first phase of the museum's £120 million 10-year plan to refurbish and redisplay its entire collection. The new galleries, which opened Dec. 2, include hundreds of previously unseen pieces, necessitating a great deal of conservation work and research. “Many of the pieces have not been on display for 25 or 30 years, either because they needed work or we didn't have the space,” said Moira Gemmill, the museum's director of projects. For example, the museum's 12th-century Romanesque Trie-Château stone window arches had been in storage since 1983 because “there wasn't a location for it,” she said. Now the museum can take the extremely rare arcade and “weave it into the overall chronology.” Explanatory labeling, which has purposely been kept to a minimum, is complemented by computer displays at which the visitor can interact with the collection (you can flip through those da Vinci notebooks, for example; at other screens visitors can find out more about the exhibits through text and images). “We wanted the objects to be the heroes,” Gemmill said. “We didn't want them to be crowded with graphic, contextual interpretation.” Other objects are partnered with audio. At the “Boar and Bear Hunt” tapestry, circa 1425-30, visitors can listen to the poet Simon Armitage reading a hunt-themed passage from the 14th-century narrative poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Elsewhere, the pairings are visual. At the heart of “The Renaissance City” gallery, a courtyard is evoked with a working fountain surrounded by dramatic sculptures. In other presentations, the scale is decidedly smaller. In an area devoted to Renaissance style and living, a cabinet contains an array of glasses. But only on close inspection can the viewer note the interesting quirks. A glass, circa 1570, features a windmill apparatus for a stem; the windmill is actually a whistle that, when blown, moves the hands of a clock at the back of the stem. The trick, apparently, was to drink while the clock spun. Failure to complete that task meant the drinker had to finish as many additional glasses as the remaining number on the clock. __
