In July, in northern France, an enormous folding screen was stored in a crate, which was suspended in a cage, which was delicately loaded into a special truck, which was accompanied by a police convoy as it made for the English Channel. At the center of this operation was the Bayeux Tapestry, an ancient wall hanging that narrates, over the course of two hundred and twenty feet, the Norman conquest of England, in 1066. Likely for the first time in French history, the tapestry was travelling to England. Or, as the English said, it was coming home.
We English think this is spiffing. Norman rule helped shape both our churches and our laws, not to mention the language that this sentence is written in. The year 1066 is considered the start of our national story, and, though the tapestry has been held in Bayeux, France, for centuries, it was likely made in England, by and for people who lived through the conquest. This month, the embroidery—“tapestry” is a misnomer, since the work was stitched onto cloth, not woven on a loom—will be put on display in the British Museum, where it will be laid flat, in a custom-made case, in a huge room. The curators are expecting at least seven hundred thousand visitors over ten months. When tickets went on sale, the digital queue was nine hours long.
Among the French, the mood is anxious. The tapestry’s early life is shrouded in mystery, but it seems to have led a fameless existence in Bayeux for hundreds of years. After coming to the attention of antiquarians, in the early eighteenth century, the tapestry’s renown grew, and its compound identity allowed both the French and English to claim it as their own. When Napoleon was prospecting an invasion of England, he hung it in the Louvre, supposedly to inspire the nation. After Allied forces invaded Normandy, the cover of this magazine was mocked up in Bayeux-style stitching.
Until recently, British efforts to secure a loan had met with little success. When Emmanuel Macron revived the idea, in 2018, a curator at the Bayeux Museum insisted that moving the frankly archeological textile was, conservationally speaking, inconceivable. Just eighteen months ago, the prefecture of Calvados, where the tapestry resides, uploaded a video that reportedly emphasized this point. (The video has since been taken down.) Yet the tapestry belongs to the French state, which made it Macron’s to lend. Last summer, an arts journalist named Didier Rykner started a petition against the loan, and quickly garnered more than seventy thousand signatures. When I called Rykner from London, he told me that the tapestry was more culturally important for the English than for the French. “That’s no excuse,” he added quickly. “The more important it is for you, the less O.K. you should be with it being moved.” Immaculate logic, yet somehow it isn’t so.
Certainly, this is not a textile that can be easily replaced. In the last three centuries, scholars have unearthed a few morsels—a description in an old poem of a similar tapestry; some rare Scandinavian textiles—that provide at least fragmentary context for the artifact’s existence. In reality, though, this object is one of one. Precious little of anything survives from a millennium ago, let alone textile, let alone narrative textile, hundreds of feet of it, unfolding in scene after scene with the colors still crisp. The British government’s indemnity scheme has insured the tapestry for an estimated billion dollars.
For sheer curatorial jeopardy, the closest comparison is the 1963 loan of the “Mona Lisa” to the United States. Where that gesture followed the Normandy landings and the Marshall Plan, this one arrives after ten years of Franco-British froideur. In 2016, Britain voted to leave the E.U.; shortly afterward, increasing numbers of migrants began crossing from France to England in small boats, creating a political pressure point at the maritime border. At a time of great friction, Macron hoped the gift would help the British and the French “make a new tapestry together.” Given the circumstances, his commitment was defiantly magnanimous. “In his clever, instinctive way, Macron understood that this tapestry would have far greater impact in the U.K. than it has had in France,” Lord Peter Ricketts, the U.K. government’s special envoy for the Bayeux Tapestry, told me. “It’s a foundational part of our story. Everybody knows 1066, even if they don’t know the detail. Why not lend it to the British?”
I can think of a few reasons. The Bayeux Tapestry is centuries old, torn in thousands of places, and liable to fray at the lightest touch. It is about as long as a giant-sequoia tree is tall. For decades, it hung on a U-shaped rail in a secure chamber of the Bayeux Museum, attached to a modern linen backing that weighed hundreds of pounds. In the twenty-tens, modern investigations made clear that the work was in danger of becoming distorted by this display, which would need to be redesigned. Whether or not a loan occurred, the tapestry would be taken down, and that, in turn, would require some thought.
Even for a famous masterpiece, the Bayeux Tapestry exerts an unusually powerful hold over the professionals who work with it. “These people fall asleep thinking about the tapestry, they wake up thinking about the tapestry, they spend their day thinking about the tapestry,” Aurélien Meyer, whose design firm worked on the new display table, said. “Everything is about the tapestry.” Owing to the item’s fragile condition, it had to be stored lying flat. It also couldn’t be manipulated by hand, for the same reason. You see the problem. How do you rotate a hundred-pound piece of cloth without touching it?
The ingenious answer was proposed by an art-engineering firm called SMACH. The company’s experts realized that, if the tapestry could not be rotated and stored, perhaps it could be stored and then rotated. They designed an object that resembles a huge, many-hinged ruler: a zigzag support that folds up, like a Japanese screen, into a neat cuboid. (They called this object le paravent, the French word for folding screen.) The museum could clip the tapestry to a rail, then feed it into the paravent inch by inch; when the whole thing was transferred, the huge zigzag could be folded up—with the tapestry secured between layers of padding—then turned on its side. When the extraction took place, last September, ninety people wearing blue latex gloves lined up behind the tapestry. A museum employee called out instructions—un, deux, tac tac, stop—and, on the third beat, everyone moved the tapestry another inch along the rail. The entire process took seven hours.
During the design phase for the paravent, SMACH believed that their object was going to travel only around three hundred metres, to a storage space in Bayeux. They were shocked to learn, halfway through, that it would be travelling three hundred miles, to London. “The mood was not great, I have to say,” SMACH’s co-founder Cécilia Gauvin told me. “We were all very scared about the outcome. But, you know, it came from above, so we had to do it.”
Gauvin asked a Dutch art-shipping firm, Hizkia, to think about ways to transport the tapestry. When the firm’s founder, Hizkia van Kralingen, drove down to Bayeux, he often found a huge group of people waiting for him. “The French, the English, the politics, the translators, the representatives from Macron—those meetings had thirty people in them,” he said. Hizkia’s plan was to build a huge crate around the folded paravent, then enclose that crate in a large aluminum frame. The big uncertainty of the operation involved vibrations. The loan specified a precise condition: the tapestry could be subjected to tremors no larger than two millimetres per second.
Van Kralingen asked a longtime collaborator, a German vibration-technology scientist named Kerstin Kracht, to join the project. “Vibration scientists, we’re the firemen,” Kracht told me, laughing. “It’s always the same. When a painting vibrates too much, when a car vibrates too much: ‘Kerstin, can you come?’ ” Since all of the objects in a system influence vibrational behavior, Kracht likes to study them first in isolation and then in combination. “It is a puzzle of subsystems,” she told me. “We have the subsystem of the truck, the subsystem of the inner crate, the subsystem of the wire-rope isolators, the subsystem of the outer crate, the subsystem of the paravent and of the object itself.” In this case, the paravent proved especially meddlesome. When a dry run took place in February, it became undeniable that the device was actually amplifying the tapestry’s vibration, which far exceeded the limit.
Most of the project team members were devastated. But Kracht was simply irritated. “This value drives me crazy,” she said. It wasn’t wrong, just incomplete. “Millimetres per second is a speed, and it’s an amplitude,” Kracht explained. That is, the metric tells you both how far an object moves and the time it takes to travel that distance. “The frequency—how often per second you change direction—says much more than amplitude,” Kracht said. While the tapestry’s amplitude surpassed the metric limit, the metric itself was misleading, and the work could travel safely with no further changes.
That left the bureaucratic challenge of communicating this fact to the relevant stakeholders. In a series of video calls with different groups, Kracht explained it in terms of a baby rocking in a cradle. Would it be better if it moved in short jerks, or in long, steady swings? “I don’t think all the people understood this, or, let’s say, wanted to understand it,” Kracht said. But, ultimately, the group was persuaded. When the tapestry finally travelled from Bayeux to London, it experienced fewer vibrations than many objects do from the ordinary footfall of a busy museum.
When those first viewers sidle up to the tapestry, will it measure up to their expectations? I can only speak for myself. I saw the tapestry ten years ago, in my early twenties, while road-tripping through northern France. I hadn’t planned to go, but I’m English, and I was near Bayeux. It felt obligatory.
Source: Read the original article on www.newyorker.com
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