'Sleeping Nymph', Antonio Canova

'Sleeping Nymph', Antonio Canova, 1820-1824. Museum no. A.30-1930

'Sleeping Nymph'
Antonio Canova
About 1820-1824
Museum no. A.30-1930

Famous throughout Europe, Canova was the last great pre-modern Italian sculptor. His reputation declined soon after his death in 1822, but was revived two hundred years after his birth in an exhibition at Rhode Island School of Design in 1957. This modernist school appreciated his austere formality, drained of blood: Canova was once described as 'born dead'. His nymph, inspired by a classical hermaphrodite, is both a symbol and a portrait: the model is reputed to be Madame Recamier, the celebrated society hostess, no hermaphrodite. Kenneth Clark complained that 'mechanical execution had removed the last tremor of excitement', but her cold beauty is intensely erotic.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Pair of shoes for a woman's bound feet, 1850-1950. Museum no. FE.49:1-1999

Pair of shoes for a woman's bound feet, 1850-1950. Museum no. FE.49:1-1999

Pair of shoes for a woman's bound feet
China
About 1850-1950
Embroidered mauve and black silk
Museum no. FE.49:1-1999

The ritual deformation of women's feet by restrictive binding was a Chinese tradition that only died out in the last century. Often no more than ten centimetres long and sometimes no more than a thumb's width across, exquisite shoes were required both to conceal and display these feet. A curious dialogue existed between erotic beauty and this physical deformity: men sought sexual contact with the Lotus Foot.

European travellers in the nineteenth century noted that the swaddling produced a distinctive smell. Not only did foot-binding restrict the 'vaine walkes' of Chinese women, it created a body part that was often seen as sexually charged.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Imperial Throne of Emperor Ch'ien Lung, 1775-80 (Qing Dynasty). Museum no. W.399:1-1922

Imperial Throne of Emperor Ch'ien Lung, 1775-80 (Qing Dynasty). Museum no. W.399:1-1922

Imperial Throne of Emperor Ch'ien Lung
China
1775-80 (Qing Dynasty)
Red carved lacquer on wood
Museum no. W.399:1-1922

Here is a beautiful expression of the gorgeous, indomitable power of the Chinese emperor. Made by the greatest of China's craftsmen at one of the most productive periods of Chinese art during the European eighteenth century, it is among the largest single pieces of red lacquer in the world. The throne was designed to project a near divine authority and a mondain grandiosity in the travelling palaces the emperor used when hunting outside the Forbidden City. The emperor of China saw himself as supreme ruler of a world where he sat at the centre. This throne is literally the seat and symbol of an awe-inspiring absolute power.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Katana blade, Kunihisa of Osaka

Katana blade, Kunihisa of Osaka, 1922. Museum no. M.192-1935

Katana blade
Kunihisa of Osaka
Japan
1922
Steel
Museum no. M.192-1935

This is the celebrated, one-edged long-sword of the Japanese warrior class of the feudal period. Both a superbly crafted weapon and a powerful symbol, it is an authentic liaison of function and form. Only samurai were allowed to carry long-swords and they created an elaborate culture of handling individual blades: a samurai's soul was believed to reside in his katana and every gesture made with it was susceptible to meaningful interpretation. The samurai were disbanded in 1876 as a gesture of Japan's rejection of hermetic feudalism and embrace of international modernism. The symbolic value of the katana endured, however. Swords were banned after the end of the Second World War to indicate humility, but legal production began again in 1953. The katana's essential principles of efficient function with symbolic form were adopted by Japanese industrial designers, including Komin Yamada whose exquisite Global kitchen knives maintain an ancient tradition of highly skilled blade-making.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Black Raku ware bowl, attributed to Hon'ami Koetsu

Black Raku ware bowl, attributed to Hon'ami Koetsu, early 17th century. Museum no. 247-1877

Black Raku ware bowl
Attributed to Hon'ami Koetsu
Japan
Early 17th century
Museum no. 247-1877

The Japanese chanoyu, or tea ceremony, demonstrates a belief that, given discipline and attention to detail, the most routine acts and humble objects can acquire a transcendent form of beauty. Significantly, the serene chanoyu was established at a turbulent time in Japan's history. Chanonyu was practised in a small square room, also a stage for ikebana or flower arranging. The room was designed to achieve a meditative calmness while participation in the tea ceremony was a qualification for membership of polite society. Tea had been known since the third millennium BC, but the chanoyu with its precise rituals and beautifully considered paraphernalia turned the drinking of a simple beverage into a highly aestheticised performance with spiritual as well as gastronomic dimensions.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Plaster cast of Michelangelo's David, about 1857. Museum no. REPRO.1857-161

Plaster cast of Michelangelo's David, about 1857. Museum no. REPRO.1857-161

Plaster cast of Michelangelo's David
Unknown, after Michelangelo
Italy
About 1857
Museum no. REPRO.1857-161

Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli were on the jury that decided to showcase Michelangelo's sublime youth in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio in 1504 (it was moved to the Accademia in 1873). David was a very conscious essay in homoerotic allure. However, Michelangelo's technique in enlarging an adolescent model to giant proportions has had its critics, including Jakob Burckhardt, the great Renaissance historian, who explained that David's beauty could best be appreciated when the proportions were restored by viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope. This plaster cast arrived (an unsolicited gift from the Duke of Tuscany) at the Foreign Office. It went on show at the South Kensington Museum (the V&A's predecessor) in 1857, intended to instruct the public in the matter of male beauty. It was believed that Queen Victoria was, however, shocked by the penis and a detachable plaster fig-leaf was provided to restore decorum.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Ewer, 10th-11th century. Museum no. 7904-1862

Ewer, 10th-11th century. Museum no. 7904-1862

Ewer
Egypt (Fatimid)
10th-11th century.
Rock crystal
Museum no. 7904-1862

The ewer was made in Egypt about the year 1000 of the Christian era. It is a masterpiece of Islamic craft. Sophisticated techniques were required to hollow-out a massive piece of the super-hard rock crystal into a vessel whose walls are mere millimetres thick. The magical clarity achieved was prized by contemporaries as a mystical combination of the properties of air and water. Difficulties of working the surface reduced decoration to a severe simplicity. After the looting of Cairo's treasuries, the ewer found its way to Europe where it was transferred to Christian use and admired as a marvel of exotic beauty. The hunting scenes indicate its original use was secular, as part of a lost Islamic world of courtly life with wine, poetry and music. Rock crystal - like Chinese celadon - was believed to shatter on contact with poison...a comment on the fragility of beauty itself.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Plaster cast of Domenico Brucciani's Portico de la Gloria, Santiago de Compostella

Plaster cast of Domenico Brucciani's Portico de la Gloria, Santiago de Compostella, 1866. Museum no. REPRO.1866-50

Plaster cast of Domenico Brucciani's Portico de la Gloria
Santiago de Compostella
1866
Plaster case
Museum no. REPRO.1866-50

This magnificent cast from the pilgrimage destination of Santiago de Compostela possesses two sorts of beauty. First, as a representation of heaven, the original is one of the greatest glories of Christian art. Second, as a bravura replica, the cast shows the bewildering confidence of the Victorians and their moral certainty that beauty could be captured by technology. The Portico was cast on site by Domenico Brucciani in 1866, arriving in the V&A in 1873. Later Brucciani went into business with the Museum, selling plaster casts to art schools in a pioneering campaign of mass-producing beautiful objects for the purposes of inspiration. Meanwhile, Master Mateo's original of 1188 remains in Galicia as the supreme artistic achievement of the pilgrimage style. But this Victorian copy, equally magnificent in ambition and execution, is an early demonstration of a modernist principle: that beauty must be reproduced.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

'Two Angels with Candlesticks', Tilman Riemschneider

'Two Angels with Candlesticks', Tilman Riemschneider, about 1505. Museum no. A:16-1912

'Two Angels with Candlesticks'
Tilman Riemschneider
Germany
About 1505
Carved limewood with traces of paint
Museum no. A:16-1912

That the successful sculptor Tilmann Riemenschneider was also briefly the Mayor of Wurzburg indicates his status as an artist, yet until the nineteenth century his work was obscure. But just as El Greco was rehabilitated in Spain, so was Riemenschneider in Germany. His rediscovery was a part of Germany's emerging national consciousness, but also a part of the emotional adventure that created modern art. Riemenschneider's controlled, but emphatic, expressiveness was held to represent characteristic northern angst , but he also projects great Gothic pathos. The sense of mysticism in Johann Hesse's sacred poem 'O Welt, ich muss dich lassen' (Oh World, I must leave you) can also be found in the recondite beauty of these limewood angels. It is significant that Riemenschneider's 1505 candlesticks (made for the tiny church at Wolferstetten) entered the V&A collections in 1912, at just the time Expressionism with its overt appeal to the emotions was emerging in continental Europe.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Relief of Virgin and Child, possibly Donatello

Relief of Virgin and Child, possibly Donatello, about 1455-1460. Museum no. 57:1-1867

Relief of Virgin and Child
Possibly Donatello
Italy
About 1455-1460
Gilded terracotta
Museum no. 57:1-1867

The gossipy historian Giorgio Vasari (described by Adrian Stokes as 'the most successful booster in all history') said Donatello invented the type of low relief sculpture known as schiacciato (literally: squashed). What Donatello also invented was a style of sculpture that, while exceptionally graceful on the surface, suggested great emotional tension under the repose of those same squashed surfaces. Donatello was self-conscious in his attempts to rival classical sculpture, but he also drew from life. His Christ-child is both a Florentine urchin and a pagan amorino. But in turning emotion into stone Donatello exceeds his antique masters. The sight of the Donatellos in Florence inspired the poet B.H. Fairchild to write: 'What are you thinking? And I say Beauty thinking/of how very far we are now from the machine shop/and the dry fields of Kansas'.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Tea kettle and stand, Christopher Dresser

Tea kettle and stand, Christopher Dresser, 1880-1890. Museum no. M.935-1983

Tea kettle and stand
Christopher Dresser
England
1880-1890
Electroplate with ebonized wood details
Museum no. M.935-1983

Dresser enrolled at the Government School of Design, a forerunner of the V&A, when just thirteen. Later he studied plant forms with a view to applying principles of organic growth to the newly emerging category of mass-produced consumer products. A distinguished academic and successful design consultant (he advised Wedgwood and Minton), Dresser is best known for the astonishing geometrical metalware he designed during the 1870s. These were the most uncompromised industrial designs ever seen. So far from imitating vegetable forms, his toast racks and kettles are entirely without precedent. And, indeed, without successors. After this bout of vivid creativity, Dresser returned to more conventional Victorian models: despite predicting the Bauhaus, Dresser was an eccentric one-off, unable to escape the suffocating excess of his age.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 'The Day Dream'

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 'The Day Dream', portrait of Jane Morris, 1880. Museum no. CAI 3

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82)
'The Day Dream'
Portrait of Jane Morris
England
1880
Oil on canvas
Width 92.7 cm x height 158.7 cm
Museum no. CAI 3
Bequeathed by Constatine Alexander
© Ronald Stoops

Here Dante Gabriel Rossetti shows a beautiful woman as sex object, blurring distinctions between the aesthetic and erotic. The model was William Morris' wife, Jane, described by Henry James as 'guiltless of hoops' (meaning she daringly used neither supports nor stays leaving her voluptuous curves explicit). The imagery is as explicit as her body: in an unambiguously erotic gesture with the honeysuckle, she encourages sap to rise. Inspired by a Tennyson poem - 'Her full black ringlets downward roll'd' - Rossetti wrote a sonnet of his own on the frame. His vocabulary suggests a ripe sexuality: 'nursed in mellow intercourse', 'sheathed', 'tongues', 'buds'. Tennyson had written, 'Beyond the night, across the day/Thro' all the world she followed him'. This painting of a predatory woman with a keen sexual appetite is as erotically intense as it was possible to be in 1880.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

John Constable (RA), 'Study of Clouds'

John Constable (RA), 'Study of Clouds', 1822. Museum no. 590-1888

John Constable (RA) (1776-1837)
'Study of Clouds'
England
1822
Oil on paper
Museum no. 590-1888

In 1822 a fast-moving cloud would have been the very fastest thing a man had seen: faster than a horse, a ship or even Richard Trevithick's new steam locomotives. John Constable had an ecstatic approach to nature, but it was also a scientific one. One of the very first painters to distinguish cloud types, he worked in parallel to Luke Howard whose 1802 lecture 'On the Modification of Clouds' began the serious study of the sky. Constable's written notes reveal both an artistic liveliness and a technical precision (some of it borrowed from Howard), but when he said 'I have done a good deal of skying' he suggests an almost supra-natural mysticism. To Constable, painting was an intensely emotional activity: its beauty at first in the mind, then in the hand and lastly in the eye.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Bottle, Lucie Rie

Bottle, Lucie Rie, 1967. Museum no. CIRC.1226-1967

Bottle
Lucie Rie
England
1967
Stoneware
Museum no. CIRC.1226-1967

In the twentieth century, industrial designers usurped artists' historical monopoly on physical beauty. As a result, art became detached from life and wearisomely abstruse. The craft object evolved as a compromise: more personal and soulful than manufactured goods, more accessible than conceptual art. Of all potters Lucie Rie concentrated most emphatically on aesthetic purity. Unafraid to use industrial materials ('the pink comes from the chemist') she was nonetheless influenced by traditional Chinese and Persian ceramics. Few objects or images made in 1979 have the same absolute, meditative purity as this bottle.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Poster issued by Olivetti Typewriter Co. featuring the Olivetti Lexicon 80 typewriter, Marcello Nizzoli

Poster issued by Olivetti Typewriter Co. featuring the Olivetti Lexicon 80 typewriter, Marcello Nizzoli, about 1953. Museum no. CIRC.634-1965

Poster issued by Olivetti Typewriter Co.  featuring the Olivetti Lexicon 80 typewriter
Marcello Nizzoli
About 1953
Museum no. CIRC.634-1965

As a manufacturer, Olivetti had a long history of high social and artistic purpose. Bauhaus designers worked on its posters and helped create the first typewriter conceived as a desirable consumer product, but it was the painter Marcello Nizzoli who established Olivetti as undisputed leader in the beautifying of ordinary objects. The sculptural sophistication of the Lexikon 80 of 1948 is typical of his work. In 1952 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acknowledged Olivetti's achievement in bringing beauty to the workplace by giving the Italian company the sort of one-man-show that is usually the privilege of painters.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

MT8 table lamp, Wilhelm Wagenfeld

MT8 table lamp, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, 1924. Museum no. M.628-1989

MT8 table lamp
 Wilhelm Wagenfeld
Germany
1924
Museum no. M.628-1989

The Bauhaus believed in bringing art and technology together, exactly as they had been in medieval cathedrals. According to Walter Gropius, 'each object should fulfil its function in a practical way and be long-lasting, affordable and beautiful'. The strictest observers of this creed were in the school's metal workshop, whose 'Form-Meister' was the characterful Hungarian, László Moholy-Nagy. Here Carl Jacob Jucker and Wilhelm Wagenfeld designed this lamp in 1924. It is one of the purest expressions of Bauhaus theory: geometrical shapes and industrial materials with no concessions to decoration or frivolity. But there were paradoxes. The elementary forms were, in practice, difficult to manufacture and production was soon shifted outside the Bauhaus' workshops. The lamp is still made today, a quaint relic of a movement that believed in dogmatic, simple truths.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Architectural model of Chiswick House, The Network Modelmakers

Architectural model of Chiswick House, The Network Modelmakers, 2001. Museum no. NCOL.2-2001

Architectural model of Chiswick House
The Network Modelmakers
England
2001
Wood
Museum no. NCOL.2-2001

The Englishman, D.H. Lawrence once remarked, only feels comfortable travelling south. This was one of the purposes of the Grand Tour: to acquaint fortunate Englishmen with the warm, comforting beauties of Italy and the Mediterranean. One result of this dalliance was the transplanting to Middlesex of architectural designs originating in the brighter light of the Veneto. Chiswick House was an addition to the Earl of Burlington's existing residence. Built in 1725-9, it was conceived as a pleasure palace as well as a souvenir. It was inspired by designs of Palladio and Scamozzi, but has more eccentricity and vigour, more barbarity (critic Ian Nairn called it 'violence') than the originals. What it represents is a wistful dream of architectural perfection, experienced abroad, transported home to be contemplated in tranquillity.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Model of Sir Isaac Newton, Micheal Rysbrack

Model of Sir Isaac Newton, Micheal Rysbrack, 1730. Museum no. A.1-1938

Model of Sir Isaac Newton
Micheal Rysbrack
England
1730
Terracotta
Museum no. A.1-1938

Newton was the son of an illiterate farmer. His sense of beauty was not a physical one (he was notoriously careless about appearances), but intellectual. Determined to resolve the messy contradictions of life in a vast, synthetic theorem, he established laws of physical behaviour that will - perhaps - be eternally valid. He died in 1729 and his memorial was built, to a design by architect William Kent, in Westminster Abbey in 1730. Michael Rysbrack's terracotta sketch for the marble statue on the memorial is an imaginary portrait: he may have made the scientist's death mask, but they never met in life. The animated modelling of the clay suggests the turbulence of Newton's mighty mind: at the moment of his greatest celebrity he suffered from transient psychosis. In Newton ideas of the most profound beauty were developed by a disturbed and contrary intellect: the man who turned the Universe into an equation was obsessed by religion and alchemy.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Drinking glass, Ravenscroft

Drinking glass, Ravenscroft, late 17th century. Museum no. C.233-1912

Drinking glass
Ravenscroft
England
Late 17th century
Lead crystal
Museum no. C.233-1912

Until George Ravenscroft perfected lead crystal in the late seventeenth century, the English had relied on imported glass from Venice. The form of this glass, with its generous bowl and baluster stem, became established as a type about 1700 and went on, after George I's accession in 1714, to influence what we know as Georgian glass. As a design it works in all sizes, from a shot glass to more ambitious ceremonial styles. Technical limitations influenced the magnificent simplicity of the form. Because lead glass is slow to cool, it had to be manipulated into exactly the robust, simple shapes that appeal so strongly to English taste. Later in the eighteenth century German glasscutters arrived in London, creating more intricate designs that compromised the astonishing purity of this classic shape.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Nicholas Hilliard, 'Young Man Among Roses'

Nicholas Hilliard, 'Young Man Among Roses', 1585-95. Museum no. P.163-1910

Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619)
'Young Man Among Roses'
Possibly Robert Deveraux, 2nd Earl of Essex (1566-1601)
1585-95
Museum no. P.163-1910

This exquisite, enigmatic Elizabethan fantasy is Nicholas Hilliard's masterpiece: a perfect evocation of a Golden Age of chivalry and literature. To the elegance of the sitter is added the mystery of his identity. Some say he may be the mysterious 'WH' of Shakespeare's sonnets, but the iconography less ambiguously suggests the Earl of Essex, a favourite of the Virgin Queen. The young man's beautiful arcadia is bittersweet: an inscription says 'My infatuation pains me'. Amidst the elegance and luxury is the suggestion of tortured love and the tragic vanity of desires...'Youth's a stuff will not endure', although Hilliard's image of it transcends time.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

Head of the Buddha, Bodhisattva

Head of the Buddha, Bodhisattva, 4th-5th century. Museum no. IM.3-1931

Head of the Buddha, Bodhisattva
Probably Afghanistan
4th-5th century
Lime plaster with traces of paint
Museum no. IM.3-1931

This head of Siddhartha was made in the Buddhist stronghold of Gandhara (in modern Afghanistan) in the fourth or fifth century of the Christian era. The Buddha's serene face (originally painted) is relieved of all nagging emotion. It was made to encourage contemplation of Buddhism's Four Truths. Life is inherently an ugly struggle. This is because we are tormented by desire. So we must eliminate desire and follow the path to Nirvana, the dematerialised condition that approximates to heaven. Buddhism sought beautiful states of mind by rejecting objects...except, that is, the ones that stimulated Buddhist meditation.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator

'The Miraculous Draught of Fishes', Raphael

'The Miraculous Draught of Fishes', Raphael, 1515-16. Loan from The Royal Collection

Raphael (1483-1520)
'The Miraculous Draught of Fishes' cartoon
Italy
1515-6
Watercolour
Loan from The Royal Collection

Only in the nineteenth century did 'cartoon' come to mean a comical drawing. Hitherto it meant a design, or preliminary sketch. These designs for tapestries were commissioned in Rome in 1515, but brought to London by Charles I for use in his new tapestry workshop at Mortlake. Now they are the greatest body of High Renaissance art outside Italy. Pope Leo X intended the tapestries to be hung in the Sistine Chapel on feast days. This put Raphael in very deliberate competition with Michelangelo, whose ceiling paintings in this part of the Vatican were then assumed to be the highpoint of Roman decoration. If Michelangelo possessed a sublime, almost aggressive force, Raphael was more committed to elegance and a more quiet beauty.

Stephen Bayley, Guest Curator