The reopened V&A Cast Courts are a fabulous spectacle of Victorian theft and reverence

The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact contemporaries of department stores: the whole world acquired, catalogued, labelled, displayed and inspected. Only at the moment of consumer interaction do they differ. In a department store, everything is for sale. In a museum, everything is for edification.

The V&A is the most complete example. From the beginning it had populist and didactic intentions: collecting photographs began in the 1850s. There was a campaigning instinct: its exhibitions worked as Victorian social media, encouraging the public and rebuking manufacturers on questions of ‘taste’. And the magnificent Cast Courts were a database of accurate reproductions for visitors without the benefit of art books or European travel to enjoy free on Sundays. With nice appropriateness, Room 46B, the Italian Cast Court, has just been refurbished with a grant from the Garfield Weston Foundation, the charity of the family that owns Selfridges department stores (as well as Fortnum & Mason and Primark). Meanwhile, Room 46A, which accommodates Trajan’s Column, awaits its benefactor.

These strange rooms, originally called the Architectural Courts, opened in 1873 when the fashion for collecting plaster casts was at its height. They were designed by the sonorously named Major-General Henry Young Darracott Scott, a Royal Engineer who was also largely responsible for the Albert Hall. A vast glazed barrel vault illuminates the cast of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ 24 metres below, a gift to Queen Victoria from the Duke of Tuscany. There he stands, the uncircumcised King of the Jews, beside the Gates of Paradise from the Duomo in Florence, Giovanni Pisano’s Pisa Pulpit and Jacopo della Quercia’s great arch from San Petronio in Bologna. Pittsburgh and Paris’s Trocadéro have cast collections too, but none is quite like this in its grandeur and strangeness.