The South Kensington Museum (or the V&A, as it is now known) was founded in 1852, in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Hoping to follow on from the encyclopedic displays of art and industry that this first international exhibition had brought together, the South Kensington Museum planned to build a collection of the best examples of art and design from around the world. It saw itself as an incubator for future generations of British manufacturers and craftspeople, with collections that were intended to provide a physical dictionary of objects and ornament; one which the public, designers and manufacturers could study, replicate and draw inspiration from.
Musical instruments were in the mix from the museum’s earliest days, with the first instrument (a 1730s theorbo-lute) acquired in 1856. The earliest instrument in the collection was bought shortly after this: a harpsichord made in 1574 by Giovanni Baffo of Venice, for the Florentine Strozzi family. Other highlights include two 16th-century spinets by Annibale Rossi, the earliest known keyboard instrument in Britain (a claviorgan dated 1579, made by Lodewyk Theewes of London), and a virginal likely to have belonged to Queen Elizabeth I.
The instruments in the museum’s collection were mostly acquired in Britain and Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of the early collecting was done by the museum’s ‘Art Referees’, a group of artists, designers and scholars who were sent out around Europe to find objects for acquisition or loan. The ‘Art Referees Reports’ – a fascinating series of letters sent back with recommendations (and often including beautiful line drawings of the objects under consideration) highlight the extent to which musical instruments formed part of the institution’s broader interest in an encyclopedia of ornamental art. Rather than focusing on the history of music, these objects were acquired primarily as pieces of decorative work – seeking out the most elaborate and highly-decorated examples, the museum was interested in instruments that might demonstrate connections of ornament, material, construction and form across different types of object from the same period.
Over the past 30 or so years, the V&A has increasingly looked to highlight the position that music (and instrument-making) held in a wider social and political world. In 2015, parts of the musical instrument collection were included in the V&A’s ‘Europe 1600- 1815’ galleries – a suite of seven permanent galleries, displaying over 1000 objects from the collection. I was lucky enough to be part of the curatorial team that worked on this project and got to know several of the instruments very well, during the long process of research, conservation and display that precedes a major gallery opening.
Through a rich group of prints, libretti, furniture, textiles, ceramics, paintings, and the instruments themselves, the galleries examine the importance and proliferation of musical performance through 17th- and 18th-century Europe. The displays touch on public entertainment, such as opera and ballet, while also looking at the fascinating history of performance in the home. Musical instruments are shown as examples of fashionable domestic furniture, as princely treasures, and as part of European social and intellectual life. The galleries demonstrate shifts in both performance and audience over the period – highlighting, for example, the rise of amateur women musicians in 18th-century France, and the relationship that this had to a growing, increasingly wealthy middle class. Fashions for different types of instrument and music are also explored – my favourite example of this being a lavishly decorated French hurdy-gurdy, dating from the 1770s-80s, which formed part of a contemporary aristocratic interest in ‘peasant’ life and culture (think Marie Antoinette’s toy farm, in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles).
Another extremely elaborate instrument, that is displayed in a gallery about 17th-century cabinets of curiosities, is the V&A’s glass virginal. Dated to the late 16th century and thought to have been made in Austria or Southern Germany, this instrument is a bit of a mystery. It takes the rectangular form of a Northern German virginal, with integral case and drop-front. The outside of the case is covered with gilt-embossed leather, while every internal surface is richly embellished with glass and thin enameled metal plates. Most breath-taking is the underside of the lid, which is decorated with 18 lamp-worked, glass relief panels, showing scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Although 16th-century princely inventories occasionally refer to pieces of furniture covered with glass, the fragility of these kinds of objects mean that they very rarely survive. We don’t know who the glass virginal was made for, but it is likely to have been intended for display in a Wunderkammer (or cabinet of curiosities) and is also designed to be played. Although no other examples of instruments of this type survive, it has a strong stylistic relationship to a late 16th-century Austrian casket in the V&A’s collection, which is also decorated with glass whorls, florets and lamp-worked glass reliefs. This raises interesting possibilities about the workshops that might have made both of these objects – in the period from 1572-1591, Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol ran a glass workshop peopled by Venetian craftsmen from Murano, who introduced lamp-working (a technique in which a lamp is used to melt and shape intricate detail in glass relief) to the region. It seems likely that the virginal may have been commissioned from an instrument-maker, for decoration in this workshop.