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Rothschild treasures: a new home for a stunning British Museum collection - YouTube
Channel: The British Museum
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The Waddesdon Bequest is one of the great
collections of Renaissance works of virtuosity.
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Baron Ferdinand Rothschild wanted to give
his collection to the British Museum,
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so that it could be enjoyed by everybody.
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What is marvellous about the new display
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is its possible for the visitor now to get
closer to these objects.
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It's a magnificent room,
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to be in the British Museum, next door to
the great library,
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is a huge privilege.
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It was for many years stuck in a slightly
dusty kind of corner,
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and actually its fantastic that the British
Museum has now enabled it to sing .
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The greatness of the British Museum is the
breadth of its collection.
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The Waddesdon Bequest is pretty 'blingy',
its intense.
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These are not random objects,
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there an extraordinary way of mapping the
world.
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A sea shell that had come from the South seas,
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some geological object that had been found
in a mine and reconfigured.
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An opal glass tankard with a sea seam molded
on it
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which looks like its emerging from an Atlantic
sea mist.
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You get a socking great big emerald in the
middle of a mermaid,
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or you get some goblets.
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Crucifixion in a walnut is it?
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Tiny.
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There just mind-boggling, there kind of like
freak show objects actually.
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There are objects made by kings, made for
kings,
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given by emperors to princes.
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Now made available to everybody.
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Ferdinand fell in love when he was very young,
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with his cousin Evelina.
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He married her and she died tragically,
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we don't quite know why,
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for complications during child birth and as
did the child.
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And he never recovered.
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And that really was a dominating and depressing
factor throughout his life.
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He found human relationships difficult,
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he liked inviting people here but they were
not really close friends,
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and the one absorbing passion in his life
was this property.
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The great Rothschild house, Waddesdon Manor
became in a sense a suffragette family.
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He threw everything at that house, and everything
into the house.
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The smoking room was a place that Ferdinand
would take his male guests after dinner.
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And it was very important that it was a place
of shock and awe.
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He gathered together part of his fathers collection
and his own collection
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to create something that was coherent and
remarkable.
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He really loved the idea of walking into a
room
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and being surrounded by European culture,
European history.
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There's a very theatrical interior,
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very much a stage set for a particular kind
of elite corporate entertaining,
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this is for high politics.
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You have to imagine these wonderful objects
being shown to you through wreaths of cigar
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smoke.
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You wouldn't need any paintings in this room
because it glitters with these fantastic objects.
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He left the whole of the contents of this
room to the British Museum.
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This is theatre.
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It's fifteenth century performance.
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What you've got is every single kind of movement
going on here,
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you've got coiling, you've got dripping,
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you've got this incredible powerful kind of
transitive pushing,
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like a thrusting of the great kind of sticky
gobstopper blues and reds actually into the
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glass.
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It's an incredibly complicated object on one
level,
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on the other level, its just an incredibly
simple way of showing off.
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You have to remember that only one hundred
years before,
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they had lived in a ghetto in Frankfurt,
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where they hadn't had enough food.
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If you are a Jewish family in the mid-nineteenth
century,
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you're trying to establish yourself,
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so you collect in order to tell the people
around you
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that you're not going anywhere.
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He was surrounded by Rothschilds,
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all of whom as soon as they made some money,
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started to collect rather aggressively.
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I believe in dreams, don't you?
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The Rothschild's dream clearly have a mania
for collecting.
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This the Lyte jewel for me as a maker looking
at it,
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it's not only incredibly bedazzling,
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it's also mindbogglingly precise,
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in an age before all the high-tech wonders
of our age.
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For it to end up back in a public collection,
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in our great museum of record is a wonderful
thing.
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In these very transparent cases
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the objects feel so close
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and seem so close that you could reach out
and touch them.
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The aim is to be very close to the smoking
room experience
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in which Baron Ferdinand would of been your
guide.
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We want people really to slow down,
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and to look and that demands a degree of calm.
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The reality is that the more time you take,
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the more beautiful and extraordinary
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and actually very moving it becomes as an
experience.
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So its a very simple thing but slow down,
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just slow down.
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In the digital age, the thing is still the
thing.
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And you can make pilgrimage
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and be in its presence and see its sparkles
in your eye,
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and not in a cameras eye
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and that is something precious.
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