A LUSCIOUS Venus, her flesh tones vibrant, her auburn hair catching the first flicker of dawn, rises naked from the sea. It’s Titian, of course. Who else could have caught that half-innocent, half-knowing expression on her face? She is almost as distracting as the naked kneeling woman by Raphael, or Canova’s Three Graces, entwined around each other in translucent marble and an undressed state.

They share wall space with Botticelli’s Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child, Leonardo’s pencil studies of a dog’s paw, El Greco’s Fabula, Rembrandt’s Ecce Homo, a Guercino of unimpeachable quality, a Stubbs, a couple of Turners, a Picasso, and, naturally, a Damien Hirst. More than 500 paintings, sculptures, pieces of antique furniture, medallions and miniatures crowd the walls of the National Gallery of Scotland from today, in a new exhibition called, simply, Choice.

No more, perhaps, than you would expect in a half-way decent national gallery. Except that these have all been collected in the past 21 years, a tsunami of acquisition that even Lorenzo de Medici might envy. It would be hard — and, of course, appallingly vulgar — to put a combined value on them. But anything upwards of £100 million would not be far wide of the mark. And since the total purchasing power of all the national galleries in Scotland averages no more than £1.25 million a year, that means a lot of pockets have had to be raided to find the balance.

Sir Timothy Clifford, whose swansong exhibition this is — he is retiring after 21 years as director-general — has deployed every trick in the book to raise the money. With justifiable immodesty, he admits in the introduction to his catalogue: “We have had to use all the skill, charm, cunning, even subterfuge we could muster to acquire good works of art.” This has involved raiding the unused balances of the Property Services Agency and spending them in the course of a day; inventing a spurious deadline in order to cajole funders into raising £10 million to buy the Botticelli; getting a dealer’s chauffeur to bid for a Giambologna marble in order not to alert the opposition; using private treaty sales and favourable tax concessions to bargain with government and donors.

Not surprisingly, Sir Timothy, who has rarely hesitated to speak first, even if this has involved a bit of rethinking later, has trodden on a few feet in his time. He famously offended John Paul Getty, who had promised to help with the Three Graces purchase, when he let slip that Getty was motivated by a grudge against his father. He outraged the Edinburgh public by redecorating the National Gallery without consulting them. He further infuriated them by announcing that he intended to transfer the entire contents of the National Portrait Gallery to Glasgow (in this, mercifully, he was unsuccessful.) Above all, in the Scottish capital, he committed the unforgivable sin of being outrageously English.

All this has been overcome, however. His legacy is there to see, and the international standing of the Scottish galleries has risen immeasurably. They will never compete on equal terms with London or in some of the other great galleries of Europe or America, but in terms of the size of the country they represent and the budget they are allowed, they punch well above their weight.

That has been achieved, however, by bending pretty well every rule in the bureaucrat’s book, and it is hard to see, in the modern era of transparency and accountability, how such boldness can long be tolerated. Publicly funded bodies such as the NGS are increasingly required to conform to the full panoply of targets, benchmarks, outcomes and delivery. These, it is said, are the essential requirements of a rights-based democracy — what the public pays for it must be able to control. That aim must inevitably collide with the tastes and ambitions of an individual collector — and however much a gallery director is backed by keepers and committees of his own, he is ultimately the collector.

The current row over the Tate Gallery’s purchase of Chris Ofili’s works, is a case in point — it shows what can happen when delicate negotiations are exposed to the public. The Tate has been attacked for spending too much and for buying from an artist who is also a trustee, even though the result has been hailed as a triumph. I doubt whether the Tate’s director, Sir Nicholas Serota, could conceivably have built the collection that is today the envy of the modern art world if he had been required to account for and defend every one of his many purchases. Nor would the devious genius of Sir Timothy have been allowed free rein if he had been forced to appear before a committee of the Scottish Parliament every time he exceeded his brief.

In the end, a balance must be struck between public control and private vision. Governments have the right to know how the public’s money is spent. But they should equally be prepared to trust the individual appointed to spend it, and to delegate the responsibility for delivering value. In the case of a great art collection that value is more likely to reside in the head of one person than in a government rule book or a whole raft of committees. The Choice in Edinburgh this autumn is Sir Timothy’s, but we are all the beneficiaries.

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