At the start of last year, the Leopard Inn in Burslem, the scene of the celebrated meeting between potter Josiah Wedgwood and engineer James Brindley to agree the navigation of the Trent and Mersey Canal, ‘went on fire’. Close by, the Wedgwood Institute, founded by William Gladstone in 1863 as a design school, and proudly decorated with terracotta panels narrating the art of ceramics, stands empty. And last week, a 10ft-high red-brick bust of Wedgwood, designed by Vincent Woropay for the 1986 Stoke-on-Trent Garden Festival, was knocked down. By using weathered brickwork to sculpt Wedgwood’s coiffured hair and penetrating gaze, Woropay captured both the aesthetic delicacy of his subject and the might of the Industrial Revolution. The landmark was ‘mistakenly’ demolished for a road-widening scheme, but it is all starting to look a lot like abandonment. The late, great Paul Johnson, a child of the Potteries, once castigated the ‘dreary and uniform modernity’ imperilling Stoke’s cityscape of potbanks and bottle-kilns. The carelessness must cease and Josiah must be rebuilt, brick by Staffordshire brick. 

The transformative power of sculpture is on our minds at the V&A this week, as the museum prepares to open its seminal Donatello exhibition. In bronze, marble and terracotta, this quattrocento Florentine genius revolutionised carving techniques, the use of perspective, and the ability to capture the travails of the human condition. He established the contours of the Italian Renaissance and in his wake came Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. The South Kensington connection to Donatello began with a major purchase in 1861 (agreed by the normally parsimonious William Gladstone as chancellor) which, in the words of the previous director John Pope-Hennessy, ‘changed the whole character of the museum collection’ and saw our galleries rival the British Museum and National Gallery. Later, it was Pope-Hennessy who famously rescued the ‘Chellini Madonna’ – a cast bronze 1450 roundel depicting the Virgin with Child carved by Donatello for his physician Giovanni Chellini – from being used, of all things, as an ashtray. I have always rather enjoyed the medical inversion. 

The point of the V&A is to showcase the greatest works of human ingenuity to spark the creativity of today’s artists and manufacturers. In the late 19th century, William Morris and Owen Jones (the good one) filled the galleries of South Kensington with carpets, ironwork, tiles and fabrics from the Middle East to broaden the horizons of British designers. In that spirit, I travelled to the great port city of Jeddah to visit the Islamic Arts Biennale, which on the edge of the Hajj airport terminal has brought together a superbly curated array of contemporary and historic Islamic arts. From bejewelled Mughal scabbards to 18th-century maps of Mecca to works by a new generation of Saudi photographers, installation and digital artists, it is substantive and interesting. Across town, the Hayy Jameel Cultural Centre has opened an arthouse cinema and new gallery. In some forms, change is happening in Saudi Arabia. 

From Manchester museums to Cambridge colleges, galleries across the UK are steadily, selectively restituting historic artefacts to Canada, Nigeria and New Zealand. But public debate is understandably focused on national institutions such as the British Museum or V&A, whose trustees are unable to ‘de-accession’ any objects by strict acts of parliament. The current government supports this ban and now, as revealed by the Evening Standard’s Emily Sheffield, the Labour party has acknowledged that ‘it won’t be prioritising repealing the museum legislation’. Given this political consensus, the only way forward in addressing controversy around colonial-era objects is a programme of cultural partnerships, sharing objects, skills, and exhibitions across continents. A new system of government indemnity – providing insurance for international exchange – might help move matters along. 

‘Should not we have Omia’s head?’ wrote Wedgwood to his business partner Thomas Bentley, as they thought of famous faces to put on their latest range of Jasper medallions. Few were more celebrated in 1770s London than M’ai, or Omai, the first Polynesian to visit Great Britain, accompanying Captain Cook back from his second voyage to the South Pacific, before being taken up by Sir Joseph Banks and polite society. Wedgwood the salesman knew his value. And so too, I hope, do those with means who could assist the National Portrait Gallery in acquiring Sir Joshua Reynolds’s sumptuous portrait of Omai. This £50 million painting encapsulates that 18th-century moment of Empire, Enlightenment, globalisation, ‘Orientalism’, nationhood and the Romantic in one epic canvas. We need these building blocks of culture and beauty saved for the nation.