The British Museum is gearing up for a significant logistical problem: transferring the long-lasting Bayeux Tapestry from Normandy to London. Based on the net publication Arts Skilled, the museum has put aside £1.2 million to cowl the transport, together with all of the preliminary work wanted to get the Eleventh-century masterpiece safely throughout the Channel.
The tapestry is already being coated by a UK Treasury assure of round £800 million ($1 billion). Now the museum has confirmed the additional price of transporting the 230-foot-long embroidered wall hanging as a part of its nine-month mortgage. It is going to be on present in London from September 2026 to July 2027.
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Not everyone seems to be happy about the move. Earlier this 12 months, artist David Hockney slammed the mortgage as a “self-importance undertaking” for the British Museum, asking within the Impartial why a London establishment would threat such a traditionally important piece. In the meantime, a petition in France calling on President Emmanuel Macron to rethink the choice has gathered greater than 70,000 signatures.
The museum, nonetheless, has been working to calm nerves. Its director, Nicholas Cullinan, instructed the Guardian final 12 months that specialists on either side of the Channel are overseeing each step of the method. “This expert-led collaboration, certainly, supported for 12 years by certainly one of our main specialists on the Bayeux scientific committee, will information each stage, together with a full dry run of the journey,” he stated.
And regardless of the controversy, the museum says complaints have been minimal. In response to a Freedom of Data (FOI) request from Arts Skilled, it revealed that simply six expressions of concern have been acquired, with none coming by means of the exhibitions inbox. 4 FOI requests have been additionally famous as associated to worries about internet hosting the tapestry.
Final 12 months, French artwork historian Didier Rykner, who’s the editor of the net arts journal La Tribune de l’Artwork, instructed the Artwork Newspaper that he hopes to unite the French and British voice of discontent to cease the change.
“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 change it,” the previous director of the Bayaux Tapestry Museum, Isabelle Attard, instructed TAN. “It’s [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 Warfare II, and the way in which it’s at present offered, sewn to a textile help hung from a rail on little curler bearings, creating tensions in every single place.”
