On Wednesday 12th February 2025 James Robinson, Keeper of Decorative Art and Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, was invited to deliver the inaugural Wyvern Research Institute Lecture.
Entitled 'De Opere Lemovicino: A dialogue between two chalices', the lecture focused on the Limoges enamelled bowl of a chalice in the Wyvern Collection and its relationship to the Rusper Chalice in the British Museum (1996,0610.1). Revisiting research which had first come about during the project to refurbish the British Museum Medieval Galleries in 2009, the lecture explored the sometimes uneasy relationship between science and scholarship, the role that technical analysis has to play in art history, and the part it can play in rehabilitating objects condemned as fakes on the basis of connoisseurship.
The lecture was accompanied by an in conversation with Sir Paul Ruddock, Chair of the Wyvern Research Institute.
About the Speaker:
James Robinson is Keeper of Decorative Art and Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He has worked in a range of positions across both regional and national museums including Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, the Museum of London, the British Museum, National Museums of Scotland, and the Burrell Collection.
James is an established authority in medieval material culture and has published and lectured widely on a variety of topics in the field. As Senior Curator of Late Medieval Collections at the British Museum, he led the refurbishment of the Sir Paul and Lady Jill Ruddock Gallery of Late Medieval Europe (2009) and co curated with partners in Cleveland and Baltimore the critically acclaimed exhibition Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (2011). In 2012 he left the British Museum to take up the position of Keeper of Art and Design at National Museums Scotland. Immediately prior to joining the V&A James was Director of the Burrell Renaissance, Glasgow, where he oversaw the modernisation of the Burrell collection which was awarded Art Fund Museum of the Year in 2023.
More recently James was co-curator of Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre: Whistlers Peacock Room Reimagined at the V&A (January-August 2020) and Trésors Médiévaux du Victoria and Albert Museum: quand les Anglaise parlaient française at the Hôtel de la Marine, Paris (June 2023 - January 2024). He is co-editor of the publication Lives of the Great Makers scheduled for publication by Thames and Hudson in 2026.