Art - Ned Denny discovers tacky baubles and true gems among the Queen's treasures

For somewhere intended to display the cream of the Royal Family's long-accumulated booty, the new Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace makes a cheap first impression. After entering through a dinkily proportioned Doric portico (the kind of bland heritage-lite effect that firms adopt in environmentally "sensitive" areas, as when McDonald's goes neoclassical or Tesco's does Tudor), you find yourself in what appears to be a Las Vegas marriage parlour. What with the sugar-icing friezes, the olde worlde balustrades and the preponderance of gilt, the resemblance is so complete that you half-expect a fake Elvis to swagger down the stairs singing "Love Me Tender". Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to "Royal Treasures".

In some ways, it is entirely appropriate that the architect chosen for the job (John Simpson, one of the Prince of Wales's favourites) is someone who has absolutely no truck with modernity. Despite the claims made in the catalogue, this isn't really a serious gallery but a shop window for the royalty industry, and thus primarily intended for fragrant old ladies, troupes of Japanese newly-weds and curvaceous families from Des Moines, Ohio. And the overweening tackiness of Simpson's design is entirely in keeping with the stuff on display, much of which demonstrates what happens when vast wealth and the necessity for ostentation outweigh all considerations of beauty and taste.

Witness, for example, the display case that groans with gold of every description, from the (admittedly magnificent) 17th-century altar dish embossed with the Last Supper to shell-shaped salt cellars of varying degrees of awfulness. Another contains rows of Chinese porcelain in fancy dress, the clean lines of the original jars obscured by nightmarish encrustations of bronze gilt. Or how about a pair of nine-foot-high candelabra covered in yet more gilt, or a vase of ceramic flowers that conceals (cunningly disguised as a sunflower) a working clock? You wouldn't mind so much if all these glorified trinkets were used by dissolute dukes to vomit into, or sold off to fund stupendous drug habits; the idea that they are priceless treasures that we should gawp at while doffing our hats is, if anything, even more repellent.

OK, I'm being a little unfair here, because in among the dross is an equal number of wonders. Witness the ghost-white cameo head of the Roman emperor Claudius (c.43-45 AD), the image having been revealed by cutting away into the differently coloured layers of a large onyx pebble, or the extraordinary silver-gilt rosewater basin (c.1650) embossed with dolphins and scenes from the Deluge. Also on display are a selection of the jewel-studded weapons with which the future Edward VIII was loaded on his mid-1870s tour of India, and, in a darkened side room, a small constellation of 16th-century miniatures. Here, too, is an enchantingly lifelike head of a boy in painted terracotta (c.1498), listed in previous exhibitions as a "German dwarf", but now thought to represent Henry VIII as a child. The prize for gilding the lily goes to the gold-encrusted nautilus shell held aloft by mermaids and a silver Neptune (c.1600), its utter outrageousness elevating it from mere kitsch into a kind of opium-reverie splendour.

But when it comes to distinguishing the genuine treasures here, there really isn't any competition. The cold glitter of the Queen's diamond diadem may attract the biggest queues, but the best of the paintings have a depth and human warmth that makes them more precious than any jewels. Although nothing remains from the glory days of Charles I (when the collection included masterpieces by Titian, Tintoretto, Correggio and Raphael and was rated by Rubens as the finest in Europe), the Windsors can still muster some breathtaking pictures. Just look at Giorgione's The Concert (c.1505), the four figures linked by a single, sorrowful, unheard note, or at Lorenzo Lotto's 1527 picture of Andrea Odoni surrounded by his antiquities, one of the most complex and unusual portraits of the Renaissance. And what sparkling thing can match the sensation of gazing into the earthy depths of Rubens's Milkmaids with Cattle in a Landscape (c.1617-18), or of meeting the infinitely sober gaze of Rembrandt's Agatha Bas (1641)?

Works such as these make you long to see more of the 7,000-plus pictures that the Queen holds in trust for the nation, and wonder whether the handful that have been dusted off for our delectation is not something of a token offering. Where are all the Van Dycks, the Claudes, the rest of the Rembrandts? Where, for that matter, are all George IV's Dutch and Flemish paintings? The Queen should move out of Buckingham Palace (which she dislikes anyway), install her picture collection in its entirety and give us a Queen's Gallery worthy of the name.

"Royal Treasures: a golden jubilee celebration" is at the Queen's Gallery (020 7321 2233) until 12 January 2003

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