I’m Maria Cristina White-da Cruz and I work in the field of art history and religious art and I have a particular fascination with Christian art.

Now this particular rosary is not a usual one. A rosary is something for private devotion but it’s also used in a sort of grander scale for public devotion. Here we have something that is really not the most practical rosary. It’s extremely heavy actually and very, very fragile. It’s made of glass with gold leaf, and the filigree is also very fragile and also quite fiddly. So not something you would want to keep in your hands on a regular basis.

And the objects that have been added to the rosary, these objects which are symbols of the passion of Christ are something that’s very common in fact in Southern German rosaries and here they are silver gilt. The hands and feet are the hands of Christ and there are in fact devotions to the different wounds of Christ. And of course there’s the chalice. There is also a heart with some flames coming out of it and the heart is – if you look very carefully – on the heart you will find there’s a crown of thorns, which is beautifully chiseled, and this refers to Christ’s heart, which was pierced on the cross. And what may look like a comb are the three nails that were used to crucify Christ to the cross.

A rosary is an aid to prayer and it is usually made up of five sets of ten beads. The smaller beads are the Ave Maria beads, on which you say the Hail Mary, and the larger beads are the ones that you say the Our Father, the Paternoster. And each set of 10 beads is called a decade and on each decade of the rosary you meditate one of the gospel stories. There are the joyful stories or mysteries, there are the sorrowful stories or the sorrowful mysteries, there are the glorious mysteries. And so it’s Christ-centred, focusing on stories in the gospel, but asking Mary to mediate and to help us to come closer to God, and her son Christ.

I’m Edmund de Waal. I’m a potter. And this is the pastoral staff of an abbot. And what does he do? He commissions something for a great moment, for a theatrical entrance into his great cathedral – his abbey church. So what does he want? He wants to hold something which tells everyone all about who he is. So he has a crosier. He has a pastoral staff, made of ebony, at the top of which he has this incredible, elaborate, Rococo bit of nonsense.

It’s just one curl, one spiral, carved out of ivory on which are lots of putti, lots of naked, fat little angels, some of whom have fallen asleep; this particularly grotesque little naked angel is clinging on to a shield – fast asleep, his eyes closed. Others are still awake and are sort of sprouting their wings, and then right in the middle is the coat of arms of the abbot.

It’s heavy. If you had this whole crosier in your hands you would feel pretty powerful – it’s an object of power, it’s a bit like a sceptre or something, it comes out of having real material weight to it.

So you have to imagine yourself in some extraordinarily over the top church interior and you have to imagine this great procession in and right at the very back the abbot coming in with his staff – the staff of his office. If you think back about why you have a staff in the first place, you go right the way back into sort of liturgical history, you have a staff because you’re a pilgrim, you know, and it’s meant to be the object you carry with you on your travels. And then it becomes an object of authority, it’s the thing which keeps your authority within the church. And here, you’ve got someone who is simply going ‘I have everything I want in this life and the next and I’m just going to show off in the most kind of glorious way’.

Hello my name is Barbara Lasic, I am assistant curator on the Europe galleries, and here we are looking at the portrait of Madame de Pompadour, probably the most powerful woman in France during the age of Louis XV.

She was also considered widely as the most charming woman. She married extremely well and that very much cemented her position in French society. She famously became the king’s mistress in 1745 and remained so for five years, after which her relationship with the king became a platonic one. But she nevertheless remained the confidante of the king until her death in 1764.

So Madame de Pompadour was very clever and very shrewd at using art in order to fashion a self-identity, and the artist François Boucher was fundamental in that exercise.

So here we see Madame de Pompadour depicted in a sort of tamed wilderness. The setting is both naturalistic and highly artificial, a sort of wood, but she’s also surrounded by many roses, which was a feature that was constantly found in her portraits.

But perhaps also the reason why this painting is so simple and so chaste, is because it is meant to emphasise the non-sexual relationship that Madame de Pompadour was having with the king at that period of time, so there’s a virginal quality to this piece. There are also lovely little birds singing around and flying around, and these elements are very typical of Rococo aesthetics.

Madame de Pompadour is the presiding queen of the Rococo and this painting highlights not just the permanence of her beauty, but also the importance of her intellectual pursuits and intellectual skills in making her a foremost patron of the arts.

I’m Edmund de Waal. I’m a potter.

This is an extraordinary, beautiful, tender object. It's Mary, looking up to her left, and in the middle there would have been a crucifix and then on the other side of the crucifix there would have been Saint John. So this is part of a sort of holy triptych of figures, of which we only have one here.

All this great cloak that she's wearing is sort of rippling on, and on, and on, and on and round, and then here the wind has caught it, so her cloak floats out to the left in a great kind of Rococo sweep. And so what you've got is someone who is in the middle of extraordinary anguish, who’s sort of caught and frozen. It's very, very, very good.

It's porcelain, 1756, German, from Nymphenburg. Porcelain has only been in Europe for 45 years, but it's at the moment when it's the material that everyone wants to get their hands on. And here, can you? [scratches base] Beautiful unglazed porcelain, which is so fine. So I'm putting her down, upright again.

Porcelain is very, very old, I mean people have been collecting porcelain in Europe for centuries. But making it is still relatively new, it's only a generation old. And it comes out of alchemy; it comes out of this idea of how can you turn materials from one state into another? How can you turn base materials into gold? And it’s discovered by an alchemist in Meissen, at the turn of the 18th century. But there aren’t many white figures around at this moment. So it’s quite special not to have a painted, decorated figure. It’s saying something quite special about how you treat the material really, how special you think the material is.

Hello my name is Lucy Trench. I helped develop the displays for the Europe galleries.

This fireplace is an extraordinary and unique object. It was made Russia in a place called Tula which specialised in the production of glitzy steelwork like this, but it’s not really a Russian object because fireplaces were incredibly rare in Russia – Russians used stoves instead. So how did this fireplace come about?

Well, the story begins in 1781 when a Russian Princess visited Ireland, where she met a family called Wilmot. And she was so enchanted that she invited anyone to come and visit her in Russia anytime they wanted; and 22 years later one of the Wilmot daughters, Martha, took up her offer.

In Russia, Princess Dashkova, which was the Princess’ name, was a very famous and extraordinary person. At the age of 18 she had helped in the coup which bought Catherine the Great to power. She later became a leading intellectual and writer and the first woman in Europe to hold public office, so she’s a very distinguished person. She was also very impossible, very difficult, fell out with everybody including her own her family. And by time Martha went to stay with her, Dashkova was living virtually in semi-retirement exile on a country estate. And Dashkova just showered Martha with presents: she gave her jewellery and furs and shawls and, we believe, this fireplace.

And on the top of this fireplace, you will see in the middle what’s called the perfume burner, and on either side there are ornaments. And rather wonderfully we have a letter that Martha wrote on the 13th December 1806, which describes this perfume burner:
‘The curiosity from Tula is a machine for perfuming the rooms. Charcoal is placed in it and perfume is burned as the little machine is whisked about…sometimes by a bearded slave but more frequently by a well-powdered lackey. Its office I suppose will now be to lie quietly on the steel chimneypiece, to match which, Catherine is to take over a pair of steel candlesticks of Tula manufacture likewise.’

So it’s clear from this letter that this fireplace and the perfume burner on top and the ornaments were all sent to County Cork, which is really extraordinary and particularly since this fireplace is so elaborate and so grand and so ‘blingy’. And the Wilmot family back in County Cork were not an excessively rich family, they were a professional middle class family and they would have had a lot of brown furniture in their rooms, a lot of mahogany, and something like this would have just had an extraordinary impact, and it was actually clearly the talking point of Country Cork that the Wilmots had this relationship with the Russian princess.

So I really love this fireplace because it’s such a remarkable instance of a link of between Russia and Ireland.

Hello, I’m Elizabeth Hamilton and I’m a volunteer guide at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and here we have a decorative oval from a Tula steel fireplace for you to handle.

From about 1720 wealthy Europeans enjoyed a less formal way of living, which began in France and eventually reached all parts of Europe. Both the aristocracy and the expanding middle class revelled in new levels of comfort.

Artists and designers developed a new decorative style that we call Rococo, playful and fantastical, with themes from nature and the East. In reaction to this, came the formal Neoclassical style inspired by archaeological discoveries of Ancient Greece and Rome.

This object is a reproduction of one of eleven sections making up the fender of a Neoclassical fireplace made about 1800 in the Imperial Arms Factory at Tula, south of Moscow. You’re welcome to touch it. By this date the factory was making a range of luxury items for domestic use. Tula products are distinctive for the unique technique of cutting metal into facets. Hundreds or even thousands of faceted steel beads could be applied to a plain metal base creating a rich jewelled effect. These decorative techniques all feature on the fireplace, which comes complete with fender and shelf ornaments made of burnished steel with applied decoration of gilt copper and brass and cut steel.

The fireplace is rectangular in form, built of steel plates joined by screws and rivets. The ornaments comprise an urn-shaped vase at each end and a perfume burner in the centre. There is a pair of candlesticks, also Tula steel, but not original to the fireplace.

The fender, from which this piece is copied, stands on five ball feet. It bows out in the middle and between the upper and lower rails the fender is created with eleven oval floral wreaths of steel separated by ornate pierced tracery in studded cut steel. The oval replica piece we have here is the central section of one of those floral wreaths. Two cast copper alloy sprays of wheat have been gilded and mounted on a shiny steel back plate. The steel plate is fluted around the edges and has a decorative finish. There are three bolts on the sprays, one at the base, which forms the knot tying the sprays together. Each bolt is hammered to resemble a rose-cut gemstone. In the centre of the piece is a steel knob, again faceted like a gemstone, reaffirming the overall jewelled impression of the fireplace.

The type of instruments depicted in this tile panel are similar to those that would have played the 18th- century chamber music of Pedro António Avondano. He composed music for ballets performed in operas, as well as minuets. These were in three-four time and were written for social dances and balls. Here, his fourth minuet is played by L’Avventura London, directed by Žak Ozmo.

‘Minuet IV’, Pedro António Avondano (1714–1782)
Performed by L'Avventura London, directed by Žak Ozmo. From the album: ‘18th-century Portuguese Love Songs’, Hyperion Records, 2012

Duration 2.53

By the 18th century, Paris had become the centre of production of luxury goods. Wealthy travellers from all over Europe converged on the city, eager to purchase the latest fashionable items. One party included the sons of a Swedish count, under the guidance of their German-born tutor, Joachim Christoph Nemeitz. His book Séjour de Paris was intended as a guide for fellow travellers. And among the many attractions Paris had to offer, he of course included its excellent shopping…

‘When in Paris you find shops decked out with all kinds of beautiful clothes, and, you sometimes feel tempted to buy one or two of these things that you had never thought of before. You want to be well tailored when you return to your homeland: so you should furnish yourself above all with good clothes, fine underwear and several well-styled wigs. If someone wants a waistcoat made of cloth of gold or silver, he will find one in Paris that is as beautiful as he’ll find in Lyons, but he will have to pay more for it in Paris. Damask banyans, or morning gowns, are sold ready-made in several shops, so you just have to choose which one you want. A silver sword is a fine ornament. Lots of people like the burnished style in the English manner; others prefer French hilts that are chased or enamelled. You will find this kind of work on the Pont St. Michel, where several suppliers of weapons reside. You can find more than a hundred different kinds of snuffbox at a variety of prices. Buy one that is decent, and not too expensive. Watches should not be bought in Paris. English ones are much better and indeed are famous world-wide. If anyone has any money left after buying these things, which are almost necessities, the Palais Royale contains a thousand other jewels and precious trinkets, which will undoubtedly be to his taste.’

Extract from ‘Séjour de Paris c’est-à-dire, Instructions fidèles, pour les voiageurs de condition…durant leur séjour à Paris’ by Joachim Christoph Nemeitz (1727)

I’m Hilary Young and I’m the curator of European ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and I’m about to open up a marvellous fitted case that contains a tea service that was acquired by the British actor and playwright David Garrick in Paris in the mid or early 1760s.

It’s like opening a jewel cabinet because there’s all these incredibly intricate shapes nesting within one another and these beautifully designed card compartments and the skill in which it’s all been packed in together. The porcelain was made at the Sèvres porcelain factory, which was the royal factory of Louis XV and Sèvres set the fashions that were followed throughout Europe.

One of the interesting things about this piece is that is has to have been put together by a very specialised merchant, known in the French as a marchand-mercier. So the marchand-mercier in this case would have gone to Sèvres and then gone to a specialist case maker and then perhaps another specialist would have done the card and watered-silk fittings and then another maybe done the gilt borders.

Tea-drinking started in Europe when it began to be imported in a small way by the East India Companies and it proved immensely popular. It was first drunk as a medicine and then increasingly as a beverage. In France we always think of the country being a country of coffee drinkers, but tea-drinking became one of a number of things that became fashionable because they came from England or associated with England. So there was this wave of ‘Anglomania’ that permeated the upper echelons of French culture; horse racing was another; English tailoring and English wool fabrics were much admired.

To modern eyes – one of the most surprising things about this tea service is that it’s a tea service for six people, but the teapot is incredibly small. And it’s thought that tea was made very strong in the pot and then diluted in the cup, and then it would have been taken with milk and sugar as well.

My name is Wesley Kerr and I am an historian, horticulturalist, broadcaster.

So these are two very remarkable and wonderfully preserved figures, 250 years old, although they could have been made last week, by the Meissen factory. They were first designed by Johan Friedrich Eberlein in 1741, and they were a very popular motif. And it’s a male and female Moor with what look like sugar bowls – sweetmeat boxes they might have been called, and they were called Moors at the time which is short for ‘blackamoor’, that era’s expression for black people. And the male figure represents America. And he has got a feathered hat and a feathered headdress and he’s holding a flower; and the beautiful sinuous female figure is called Africa. She has a beautifully enamelled skirt and is holding a lemon. And they’re objects of great beauty because they would have been presented on the dinner table at the height of a fashionable society establishment dinner.

Sugar was in fact the most highly prized and traded commodity in the late 18th century. It’s hard to believe because it revolutionised Western tastes, and of course the dessert course was the highlight of your grand dinner. Sugar in the mid 18th century has transformed the Western diet, it’s the most traded commodity, but it is produced in the most grotesque and horrible conditions. And in fact a few years ago I went to Ghana, to the Slave Coast, which is where perhaps the ancestors of these figures modeled by Eberlein had been traded from. Between 12 million and 20 million Africans are taken forcibly from one continent to another over a 300 to 400 year period. And the thing that they are producing above all is sugar. A quarter of the slaves didn’t make it across the Middle Passage. A quarter were dead within a year. The conditions of growing sugar were really, really quite difficult.

But of course art is never to be separated from the economic product that it is or the society that produces it, and it doesn’t stop these being amazingly beautiful objects. But they tell a vivid and complex - a very moving story.