The Victoria and Albert Museum's New Storehouse Opens in London: Exhibits May Be Viewed Up Close and Without Glass, and Almost Any of the Hundreds of Thousands of Objects in Its Holdings Can Be Studied in Detail by Request in a Special Room

Among the notable exhibits are Picasso's largest theatrical work, made for the ballet Le Train Bleu as part of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes seasons in Paris (because of its size it has rarely been displayed), and an 18-tonne seventeenth-century colonnade from Agra.

In the new storehouse one can see the most varied objects of world culture: from samples of ancient Egyptian textiles to a rare Balenciaga dress, from fourteenth-century ceramics to the cauldron devised by Thomas Heatherwick for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Of course, the very idea of such an open store harks back to the tradition of the cabinets of curiosities that existed in Europe from the sixteenth century, and in their original form at that, before such collections began to acquire one specialism or another.