Very good casting

With Trajan's Column rising from medieval tomb effigies on one side and large-scale Renaissance works - including Michelangelo's towering David - on the other, the newly refurbished arcade housing the Gilbert Bayes Sculpture Gallery offers impressive views of the V&A's Cast Courts below.

Granted, they're only life-size plaster casts dating from the 19th century but it's a thrilling sight all the same. Named after the British sculptor whose art nouveau figures revisit themes of medieval chivalry, the gallery contains works from the past 1,000 years. Organised primarily by material and method, rather than chronology, the gallery examines the techniques traditionally used in Western sculpture.

Short videos show the complex processes involved in making a finished cast and the gallery is divided into areas that explain the two main methods of sculpture making: modelling from clay and carving from materials such as stone.

One material common in England was alabaster, softer than the marble available in Italy and therefore easier to handle. The collection of alabaster carvings produced in England and Northern Europe from the early 15th century offers one particularly eye-catching resurrection scene: a goggle-eyed Christ positively striding out of his tomb to flat-footedly step on to the chest of a stiffly prone Roman soldier.

Astonishing to think it was just 80 years before Michelangelo was to give us his muscular and naturalistic David.

Ongoing, Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road SW7, daily 10am to 5.45pm (Wed and last Fri of every month to 10pm), free. Tel: 020 7942 2000. Tube: South Kensington