New home for Donatello and Da Vinci at V&A

The Victoria and Albert Museum yesterday announced that the first phase of its dramatic expansion plans will be completed with the opening of its £30m medieval and Renaissance galleries this time next year.

Ten new rooms occupying an entire wing of the museum will display 1,800 treasures including a permanent display of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks.

A whole gallery is to be devoted to the work of the sculptor Donatello, while masterpieces of medieval craftsmanship on show will include the largest of the enamel caskets dedicated to St Thomas à Becket.

The V&A already has a collection of Renaissance sculpture widely regarded as the finest in the world outside Italy, and in the new development an entire Florentine chapel from Santa Chiara will be open for the public to browse inside.

However, details of the bold initiative – for which almost all of the £120m funding is in place – were followed by comments from Mark Jones, the director of the V&A, warning of the difficulty in raising funds for arts intiatives in the current economic climate.

"People are not feeling as rich as they were this time last year," said Mr Jones. "It's too early to say what the effects of the recession will be on people who give but in America, which is usually ahead of Britain, they have found it more difficult to raise money." He added that despite a possible dip in funding, visitor numbers may rise. "In a time when the economy is not doing well, people do value free museums," he said. The V&A's second phase, for which an additional £120m is required, will involve the creation of additional gallery spaces for fashion and textiles, photography and furniture.

Mr Jones added that one way of raising funds was to lend items to other galleries around the world. "We are doing more and more of that," he said.

The V&A's fundraising campaign will be one of many next year. Tate Modern has an existing appeal to raise £215m for an extension by next year, and 37 of Britain's leading artists are campaigning with the National Gallery and National Galleries of Scotland in an attempt to keep two Titian paintings from being sold to foreign buyers.

The museum's first phase will also include a 12th-century window from France, called the Trie Chateau window, that has not been displayed for 25 years. Other aspects include "theatre and perfomance" galleries that will open in March, and a display of 60 Asian and Buddhist sculptures to open in April. In September, the V&A will re-display 3,000 objects from its ceramics collection, which is the largest in the world.

The plans first got under way with the opening of the British Galleries in 2001. Since then there have been 18 new gallery openings, resulting in visitor numbers more than doubling.