And so to the Victoria and Albert Museum London January 1st. The V&A remains a mess and really is a good cafe with a dowdy museum attached. However if the (metaphorical) dust is blown away for a moment or two there are things to be enjoyed. I found the Donatello Room which is devoted to some pieces of the work of his workshop. I say this advisedly because it is very clear from the captions the nature of the enterprise. There is a model of and alterpiece, no doubt a design work for approval by a customer (and I use that word advisedly), there are examples of caste works “mass produced’ for facades and domestic use, half completed reliefs where the completed carving is attributed to the master on stylistic grounds, and some shallow reliefs apparently a speciality of the workshop. The variety of works in this small room points to a large scale business serving the newly developed tastes of rich and not so rich Paduans in the 40’s of the 15th Century.
A second pleasure was the Zoomorphic Exhibition of recent architecture based on organic forms and structural principles. The model of the Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo revealed to me for the first time that the metaphor of the curving roof was a sinuous snake.
Websources for DonotelloCuratorial photographs of Zoomorphic buildings
Peter's Notes and Commonplaces
