The Waddesdon Bequest is one of the great collections of Renaissance works of virtuosity.
The objects were first put together in the great Rothschild house in Buckinghamshire,
Waddesdon Manor.
And when Baron Ferdinand wanted to give them to the British Museum
so that they could be enjoyed by everybody.
He wanted that connection with Waddesdon to remain and so we've always called it since
then,
the Waddesdon Bequest.
We all think because of Downton Abbey
that country houses were places that you go to hunt and shoot and kiss,
but actually country houses at that time,
certainly for the Rothschilds had a much more serious purpose.
They were places to entertain the great and the good,
and they were places to show off really your wealth and your success
and that you had arrived.
There were these tremendous house parties,
and you'll get Queen Victoria, you'll get Edward VII
you'll get Trollope, you'll get Henry James, you'll get the Shah of Persia.
And the people you won't necessarily notice are probably the more important people.
The people who did the business deals, the movers and shakers.
That was really what the country house parties, certainly for Ferdinand was about.
So Waddesdon was quite literally a 3D calling card.
I think Baron Ferdinand enjoyed dressing up
and we have these wonderful photographs of him in Renaissance costume for costume balls.
Which show him looking quite ridiculous,
in Renaissance costume as a Renaissance prince,
wearing hat badges very like the ones in the Waddesdon Bequest,
or holding a jeweled dagger very like the one in the Waddesdon Bequest,
which is very much part and parcel of his own time,
if you think of Oscar Wilde's novel the portrait of Dorian Gray.
He portrays Dorian Gray as someone who loves emeralds and loves dressing up
and wearing Renaissance princely costume.
Well its just the same with Ferdinand.
So I think there's a definite theatrical dressing up element in Ferdinand's collection,
which probably goes very well with Waddesdon Manor.
This is the famous red book which is the privately printed photograph album
which records the Manor and the interiors and some of the key works in the collection,
and which is this wonderful document which shows the treasures from the Waddesdon Bequest
in situ, in the house, in the smoking room.
So here as we open it up,
we can see that there are images both of the outside of the house
and then we move into the inside,
and we work through the ground floor first of all.
Before heading upstairs to the smoking room.
The smoking room was a place that Ferdinand would take his male guests after dinner
and it was very important that it was a place of kind of shock and awe,
because of course as you know,
deals were started in the boardroom but they ended in the ballroom,
via the smoking room.
The smoking room has a very distinct personality,
elsewhere in the house you could be forgiven for thinking that you're in an 18th Century
Parisian hotel.
Whereas in the smoking room, you're in a very different world.
And I think that Ferdinand was setting the scene here in a very particular way for his
Renaissance museum.
He was surrounded by Rothschild's all of whom
as soon as they made some money started to collect rather aggressively.
I believe in dreams, don't you?
The Rothschild's dreams clearly have a mania for collecting.
It was partly his fathers collection which he inherited.
I think when Anselm Rothschild saw the Holy Thorn Reliquary,
he knew that this was not just one of the great moments of Medieval metal work,
it was also one of the most precious things he was ever likely to be able to acquire
and extraordinarily rare.
The thorn said to be from the crown of thorns put on Christ's head at the Crucifixion
is surrounded by the most valuable materials,
rock crystal, jewels, gold, enamel
So that you have the most spiritually precious object
surrounded by the most materially valuable things.
And I think that combination of very high quality,
very rich materials and ultimate rarity,
well that's irresistible to any collector.
For Ferdinand collecting was really very genuinely part of his DNA,
we know that from a very early age he was fascinated by collections and collecting.
And I have this vision of him following his father Anselm around learning at his fathers
knee almost.
In him reminiscences he records his first exposure to his fathers collection.
"My fathers curiosities were packed and stored away
in a strong room where they remained until the cold drove us back again from the country.
It was my privilege on these occasions to place some of the smaller articles in their
own leather cases
merely to touch them sent a thrill of delight through my small frame."
So this is one of the most spectacular objects in the Waddesdon Bequest,
and its also one of my favourites.
Its a boxwood tabernacle and its incredibly sculptural and architectural as you can see,
in its form its like a miniature building.
And all the pieces come apart so that you can play with them.
So its got a very strong playful quality,
playing with those pieces, each time you reveal new scenes from the Christian story.
You take off the Pelican in its piety finial
and these sections open out like orange segments
and on the inside each is carved with yet another scene
and in the middle is the Virgin Mary who rises up when you turn this little ratchet.
So it is really an interactive toy for taking you closer to the Christian story.
Perhaps the most intricate piece of all is this which is a prayer nut or gebetsnusse
in German.
The outside is carved with these extraordinary pieces of Gothic tracery
and you can imagine yourself walking around this architectural form of the prayer nut.
It's a bit like some astonishing Gothic cathedral.
And when you open it up,
there are yet two more doors which are carved with scenes from the life or Christ,
and when you open those,
the top half is carved with the scene of the Crucifixion in incredible detail,
its like a miniature theatre.
I always find it incredibly moving thing to handle,
its a very personal intimate kind of object.
And then the craftsmanship is so astonishing
that every time you look at it you notice something different
and it really comes to life in your hands.
You can imagine the person who first owned this object playing with it and handling it,
and I'm sure that's what Baron Ferdinand did when he showed it to his visitors in the smoking
room.
You have to remind yourself that his wife had died in childbirth
and that really was a dominating and repressing factor throughout his life.
And he wrote this rather sad piece ;
"mine is a loss which years cannot repair nor any accidental circumstances relieve,
ever since my childhood I was attached to her,
the older I became, the more we met, the deeper I loved her
and in later years she had so grown into my heart that my only wishes, cares, joys, affections
whatever sentiments in fact a man can process
were directly or indirectly wound up with her existence".
Sad piece.
He found human relationships difficult,
he liked inviting people here but they weren't really close friends,
and the one absorbing passion of his life was this property
and he wanted to create both on the inside and the outside
something that was coherent and remarkable.
He really loved the idea of walking into a room
and being surrounded by European culture, European history.
It wasn't just that they were showing off,
you have to remember that only one hundred years before
they had lived in a ghetto in Frankfurt where they hadn't had enough food.
If you are a Jewish family in the mid-nineteenth century,
you're trying to establish yourself.
So you collect in order to tell the people around you that you're not going anywhere.
This is theatre, fifteenth century performance.
What you've got, is you've got every single kind of movement going on here,
you've got every coiling, you've got dripping,
you've got this incredible powerful kind of transitive pushing,
kind of thrusting of the great kind of sticky gobstopper blues and reds,
actually into the glass.
It's an object for the kunstkammer for the wunderkammer
for these spaces which are just filled with treasures.
The kunstkammer means an art chamber or an art room
they're formed by merchant bankers, like the Medici
or the Fugger.
The merchant banker dynasties of the Renaissance.
There also formed by the Habsburg
who were the ruling dynasty of half the then known world
in the sixteenth century.
Its a Renaissance idea made real by a nineteenth century banker.
The Rothschilds in a way were tying themselves by provenance to former movers and shakers
and they used these objects very deliberately to make that association.
In creating kind of a Rothshchilds kunstkammer, he's saying very clearly,
this is who we are, this is what I'm doing,
I'm looking back to these precedents and I'm making a collection of that type.
This, the Lyte Jewel,
at first it's just resonant because its this famous incredibly valuable historic object.
When you pick it up, its density is not just physical but its emotional and historical
as well.
And just the sheer number of man hours in something like this.
I think we all have a physical sense of that when we see things in a museum
and I think the Waddesdon Bequest is probably particularly full of them,
of these objects that are imbued with enormous amounts of time and care
and that radiates out of them.
There to show the power of the owner because you are buying man hours here,
you are buying not only expensive luxury rare materials
but you are buying the man hours of the best technicians of the day.
For me as a maker looking at it, its not only incredibly bedazzling
but its also mind-bogglingly precise,
in an age before all of the hi tech wonders of our age.
For it to end up back in a public collection
in our great museum of record is a wonderful thing.
Ferdinand died very unexpectedly in 1898
and it then became clear he had taken the decision bequeath his collection
that he called his Renaissance museum to the British Museum,
and his will is very specific about that fact.
He talks about the "contents of my new smoking room at the manor"
and that was what he intended to go to the museum,
his cabinet of curiosities.
He was always public spirited,
very early on in his life he wrote about the kind of transfer from princely collections
to museums
and how he thought this was a good thing.
It's the only collection within the British Museum that must be shown together on its
own.
And that gives it of course a very particular quality,
you are with the collector while you are in his collection.
We're standing in whats called the middle room in the British Museum,
which has now been transformed into the new gallery for the Waddesdon Bequest.
Its a wonderful new space because its calm, it still has the feel of a library,
this was Charles Dickens' library in the old British Museum in the 1830's.
And working with the designers Stanton Williams,
we've done many many groupings of the objects
until we found groupings which seemed to us to make sense.
And make the collection more intelligible as a family Rothschild collection.
The wonderful thing about the Bequest as now shown
is that it allows visitors to have almost the same intimacy of engagement with the objects
as Ferdinand had,
and I think you feel through that the intensity of his affection
and the emotion that went into the making and the collecting.
Because of technology and advances in lighting
you can probably show wunderkammer objects to better effect then ever before.
In these very transparent cases the objects feel so close
and seem so close that you could reach out and touch them,
and the aim is to be very close to the smoking room experience in which Baron Ferdinand would
have been your guide.
I'm kind of amazed, its real impressive, I wouldn't expect to find that in the British
Museum.
Waddesdon gallery is probably my favourite,
just because everything is so intricate and detailed,
I could spend hours in here walking around and enjoying it.
The reality is that the more time you take,
the more beautiful and extraordinary and actually very moving it becomes as an experience.
So its a very simple thing but slow down, just slow down.
I love seeing all the different things, when you look at these artefacts,
this is real life, this isn't a show, this isn't something a machine made,
this is something people actually made and so you get a real understanding of it.
In the digital age, the thing is still the thing
and you can make pilgrimage and be in its presence
and see its sparkles in your eye and not in the cameras eye,
and that is something precious.