If Grinling Gibbons had a high opinion of himself, who can blame him?

An exhibition marking the tercentenary of the death of the virtuosic woodcarver Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) may sound like a lovely idea, but how, practically, can it be done? After all, Gibbons, who, in 1693, was appointed master carver to King William III, decorated the interiors of palaces, churches, and stately homes, and many of his ensembles remain in situ. So, what, as a curator, are you going to do? Carefully prise off a few of his carvings from St James’s Piccadilly? Teleport visitors to Petworth House, or the Orangery at Kensington Palace?

There is work by the master in “Grinling Gibbons: Centuries in the Making”, the new exhibition at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, organised by the Grinling Gibbons Society and seen last month in smaller form at Bonhams on New Bond Street: a couple of coats of arms from the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge; the famous limewood cravat, imitating soft Venetian needlepoint lace, so delicate and realistic that it once fooled the guests of the aesthete Horace Walpole, who wore it as a party piece.

Yet, the show has the feel of one of those big exhibitions at the British Museum about the ancient world: there are lots of fragments, including a cabinet of scorched scraps from Hampton Court, which we must piece together in our imagination. If this sounds disappointing, it is also unavoidable – clearly, the choir of St Paul’s Cathedral isn’t going to travel, though, in fairness, the cathedral has lent four carved cherub brackets from Gibbons’s original design.

Still, the curators do a decent job of dramatizing Gibbons’s story, animating his times, and assessing his legacy: the final room, for instance, contains Gibbons-inspired wallpaper as well as a pair of intricately carved wooden prosthetic legs worn by the Paralympic sprinter and double amputee Aimee Mullins to open an Alexander McQueen fashion show in 1999. Moreover, though there is no catalogue, the V&A is reissuing “Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving” by the self-taught limewood carver David Esterly (1944-2019), whose set of gouges and V-tools – not dissimilar from those Gibbons would have used – appear in the show.

Gibbons, who favoured creamy, close-grained limewood (which the Victorians, sacrilegiously, often darkened with brown varnish), was blessed with inordinately dextrous skill as a woodcarver – the sort of prodigy to whom myth and hyperbole accrue as easily as dust upon a shoe. For instance, there’s the story of his discovery by the diarist John Evelyn, who stumbled upon him in 1671, when he was still a young journeyman working in obscurity in a lonely thatched cottage in Deptford, now in southeast London: Gibbons was carving a relief after Tintoretto’s Crucifixion (now at Dunham Massey) that so dazzled Evelyn he promptly brokered a meeting with the king. Or the (apocryphal) notion that Gibbons included ornamental peapods in his foliage: open if he’d been paid for a commission; closed when still waiting for his fee. Supposedly, his energetic cherubs at St Paul’s were modelled on his infant sons (he had 12 children). Some of his carved flowers were said to be so delicate that coaches passing outside caused them to shake.

Patiently, the curators strip away all the hype. Charles II, it turns out, didn’t make much of Gibbons on that first meeting – certainly, nothing came of it. Moreover, Gibbons was never much cop at carving in stone. The show places great emphasis on his Dutch origins: he was born into a wealthy mercantile family in the port town of Rotterdam in 1648 – so, perhaps he learned his trade in the ship-building industry there. I find the idea compelling: a pair of works on paper reveal how warships at the time were lavished with splendid ornament by highly skilled carvers. (This would also explain why he fetched up in the naval centre of Deptford.) Dutch flower painting influenced Gibbons, too.

A display of 17th-century instruments (treble recorders, violins, a bass viol and lute) reminds us that Gibbons, who probably played himself, was fascinated by music – so much so that he replicated sheet music in his compositions with such accuracy that scholars can use it to pinpoint a work’s date. Evidently, he considered himself a suave, cultivated artist, rather than a sawdust-smothered craftsman – as witnessed by a copy of the elegant portrait he commissioned from Godfrey Kneller, in which he positions himself, aged 42, as Britain’s Bernini. There isn’t a wood carving in sight.

If Gibbons, who eventually ran a workshop with 50 assistants, had a high opinion of himself, who could blame him? It isn’t his subject matter that is so distinctive (festoons of flowers, fruit, game, even lobsters), but his technique: ingeniously utilising shadow by undercutting motifs with such daredevilry that they appear to spring to life with the force of a small firework, or an intricate paper cut-out in a pop-up book. His silhouettes are crisp, his contours subtle and fluid, and every tendril, sprig and leaf so astonishingly thin that, yes, it seems to flutter before our eyes. As Walpole put it, beautifully: “Gibbons … gave to wood the loose and airy lightness of flowers”. Everyone, from the snootiest connoisseur to those with little interest in art, invariably reacts to his work in the same way: with delight.

From Sept 25 until Jan 30, 2022; information: comptonverney.org.uk; grinling-gibbons.org