A petition to cease the Bayeux Tapestry being loaned to the British Museum has garnered almost 50,000 signatures. The enchantment, launched in mid-July by the artwork historian Didier Rykner, cites warnings from textile restorers {that a} transfer might danger damaging the 1,000-year-old work’s embroidered linen material.
The tapestry, which celebrates William the Conqueror’s victory within the Battle of Hastings in 1066, is scheduled to be proven in London between September 2026 and July 2027, throughout a deliberate closure of the Bayeux Tapestry Museum in Normandy for renovation and enlargement. The collaboration was introduced in July by the French president Emmanuel Macron and the British prime minister Keir Starmer on the British Museum.
The present variety of signatories on the petition “isn’t sufficient, however we’ve a 12 months in hand, we nonetheless have time,” to dam the mortgage, Rykner tells The Artwork Newspaper. In distinction, 294,000 folks signed a earlier—and nonetheless unsuccessful—petition by Rykner to reverse Macron’s determination to fee modern stained-glass home windows for six chapels within the newly restored Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, changing Nineteenth-century home windows designed by Eugène Viollet le Duc.
Outstanding cultural figures in France are, nevertheless, amongst these to have expressed concern concerning the Bayeux mortgage.
Isabelle Attard, the director of the Bayeux Tapestry Museum from 2005 to 2010 and a former Greens get together deputy within the Nationwide Meeting, tells The Artwork Newspaper: “I feel the tapestry should not be transported, for a number of causes: its worth is incalculable and if something occurs to it no sum of money and no different comparable object can exchange it. It is [also] extraordinarily fragile due to its age, previous actions over the centuries, the way in which it has been subjected to virtually continuous lighting since its return to Bayeux after World Battle 2, and the way in which it is presently offered, sewn to a textile assist hung from a rail on little curler bearings, creating tensions in every single place.”
She continues: “I assumed this mortgage thought was an outdated chestnut (serpent de mer) that might by no means occur. Appears I used to be unsuitable.”
Voices from throughout the channel
Issues concerning the Bayeux Tapestry transfer have additionally emerged in Britain, in accordance with a report within the Telegraph newspaper. Rykner says he hopes to hitch forces with British opponents of the cultural trade, which might additionally see Anglo-Saxon and Medieval treasures from the British Museum journey to France.
Rykner, the editor of the net arts journal La Tribune de L’Artwork, is a vitriolic critic of Macron. His petition, denouncing the mortgage as a “crime in opposition to French heritage” resonates with far-right nationalist politics. Nonetheless, Macron himself, in a press convention with Starmer on 8 July, conceded that opinions have been divided on the mortgage.
An earlier mortgage proposal in 2018 was conditional on passable security assessments and was met with reservations by a variety of curators and conservationists. These included the Bayeux Museum’s director, Antoine Verney, and the textile restorers Isabelle Bédat and Béatrice Girault-Kurtzemann, who labored on stabilising the backing of the embroidery within the Eighties.
Based on Rykner, a number of specialists have instructed him they imagine shifting the tapestry poses a higher danger to it than the museum’s renovation. However Rykner claims they’re reluctant to talk publicly. “I’ve talked with three or 4 restorers who’ve labored on the tapestry they usually’re unanimous. It’s not potential to maneuver it far, and definitely to not London, it’s too fragile,” he says: “However [people] within the cultural institution are frightened to say so as a result of they’re not free. They’re all civil servants.” Bédat and Girault-Kurtzemann didn’t reply to requests for remark.
