THE nearest thing to a Winter Wonderland in the museums and galleries of London is the new display of Medieval and Renaissance Art in 10 new and revised rooms to the right of the main entrance of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Not a snowflake to be seen, of course, nor any red-nosed reindeer, but it is indeed a wonderland of sculptures, paintings, woodcarvings, stained glass, majolica, enamels, chunks of churches and palaces, shoes, ships and sealingwax, all displayed as though Mr Selfridge has piled his Pelion on Mr Harrod's Ossa. The visitor is so astonished, awed and bewildered by the unrelenting quantity that his judgment of quality is as numbed as by a trawl along the stalls of Portobello Road. This must be the largest cabinet of curiosities any of us has ever seen, and for intellectual and aesthetic relief we must seek out the small room of small things by Donatello, for here be treasures, masterpieces of the highest technical quality that with cool logic, realism and passionate emotion offer some real insight into the purposes and achievements of the Italian Renaissance. Damien Hirst's No Love Lost: Blue Paintings remain at the Wallace Collection until 24 January. They are appalling. replica rolex As the work of a pretentious teenager they might just pass as perhaps promising once the pretentions wear away and are replaced by intellectual substance and the skill that may come with knowledge and practice, but of these there is not the slightest sign and Damien is now old enough to be a grandfather. If, however, Damien's celebrity and the easy accessibility of these wretched canvases draw you for the first time into a museum that is frozen in the taste of the late 19th century, this will be no bad thing, for here to wipe away the taste and provide devastating comparisons are masterpieces by Rembrandt, Hals, Poussin, Murillo, Boucher and a host of others in their various ways as eminent.
In the old wing of the National Gallery until well past Ash Wednesday The Hoerengracht by Edward Kienholz is on view, an installation mimicking a notorious street in the red-light quarter of Amsterdam. Exquisite in detail, it is an evidently melancholy contemplation of the means by which the loveless lust from which all men suffer can be sated if they dare. More subtly, it is the lament of an ageing man confronting impotence.
Unlike most works by Kienholz, it does not invite the visitor to enter; on the contrary, while he may peer through windows as a voyeur before and after the event, he cannot see the event itself and all doors are closed against him.
Downstairs in the new replica clothing wing of the National Gallery, The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700 is more an Easter than a Christmas show, for here is Christ subdued, beaten, crucified and dead. It is the most theatrical exhibition in the gallery's history. Transformed into a place of shadows and shafting light, it introduces us to art of heartfelt piety, emotion and drama, of a realism so heightened that it hurts, of all-consuming empathy as wounds bleed and ropes cut into flesh. This is Catholic art at its most passionate, an art of profound belief, an art of sublime beauty before the rot of mawkish sentiment set in. If Kienholz presents us with man overwhelmed by animal instinct, Velazquez, Zurbaran and their peers give us man at his most mystical.
At the British Museum Montezuma reigns, is deposed and dies in the defunct Reading Room, even his traditional name denied him. With no more than the merest hint of the blood and sacrifice of Aztec culture, nothing conjures the whimpering of infants and the screams of adults, and this is a dry bone of a show devised by experts for other experts in the field. At the end of it, our imaginations utterly
