The title of this exhibition is deceptive – what if we’ve already seen the Royal Palaces, and the Holbeins and Van Dycks on display year round? The subtitle, ‘Tudors, Stuarts, and the Russian Tsars,’ is baffling and vague. The trouble is that the real theme of the show is: the ceremony of diplomatic gift giving during the first century of trade between our two nations. A prospect as inviting as the Arctic seas that provided passage for the courtship.
In fact, though obscure and scholarly, the show is revelatory, not only illuminating a neglected slice of material and political history – but also bringing a rare and important example of British Renaissance art to our shores.
The most common gift sent by the Courts of England to Moscow was expensive silverware, nearly all of which was melted down in this country during the English Civil War. Luckily, every time a piece of silver was shipped to Moscow, it was carefully weighed and inscribed in Slavonic letters with their weight and the source of the gift: an effective way of knowing at a glance which house was in good favour. The gifts have been preserved in the Kremlin Armory Museum and this is the first time the entire collection has been spotlighted like this over here.
Before we reach the silver, the V&A curators have laid an excellent red carpet of four rooms setting the scene, and showing how Henry VIII’s extravagant eye and taste for heraldry would shape the identity of the succeeding Stuart courts (who would woo the Tsars proper), and how they liked to be represented abroad. This extended to jewellery, armour, coats of arms, sculpted beasts, and paintings.
The largest space is painted a deep regal red and is, thankfully, low-lit. In the centre of the room is the tiered “buffet” of Sixteenth and early Seventeenth century British silver, as the Tsar himself would have displayed them. It’s a blinding show of riches so extraordinarily lavish that it feels almost embarrassing to look. Shape was generally considered more important than ornament in Renaissance silver, and as a collection they have an impressive, almost muscular sculptural presence: the cups are gourd shaped and font shaped, and there’s a Leopard ewer bearing his ribs and showing his teeth.
The faces on the walls that look in on the silver, including a wonderful recently discovered portrait of Elizabeth I, reveal how complex the politics was and how many personalities were involved in the relationship-building process. Among them is merchant Thomas Smith, James I’s special ambassador the Tsar, who was in charge of gifting him a lavish chariot from the King, and there’s an excellent three minute film about the significance of this act.
All in all, it was an expensive custom, but perhaps cheaper than war – and one likes to think not money wasted. We still enjoy the fruits of the courtship today. Anyone, for instance, who has seen the pelicans in St James Park may not know that they are the direct descendants of a 1622 gift from the Russian ambassador to Charles II.
Until July 14. Free entry; vam.ac.uk
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