SerpApi.Org
Like a referee addressing contestants on the television game show Gladiators, a woman wearing a headset and an ochre-coloured apron is briefing staff beside a long, wheeled table in a hangar-like gallery at the British Museum. “Winch operators, are you ready?” she asks, scanning her team. “One, two – turn!” On the “t” of her last instruction, technicians kneeling on blue mats crank their winches, and the table, supporting a precious 11th-century embroidery recording the events that led to the Norman Conquest, creeps a few inches towards a bespoke showcase. It is a painstaking process, installing the Bayeux Tapestry ahead of its public unveiling this autumn at the British Museum, where it will remain on display until next summer. But with something this fragile, and given the flak the museum has drawn for bringing it to Britain for the first time in a millennium, it is probably wise to err on the side of caution.
On Monday, after donning a blue plastic apron and black overshoes to prevent the spread of dust, I was granted exclusive access to the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery to watch more than four dozen collection managers, drawn from every curatorial department of the museum, alongside French colleagues, install the Tapestry (which, technically, is an embroidery and was likely stitched in or near Canterbury during the 1070s). In early July, following its safe arrival at the museum in the middle of the night, the Tapestry was unfolded from the container in which it had crossed the Channel, before being lowered on to the table on which it will rest while in London. Any bumps and creases were then carefully smoothed away by hand.
Over the weekend, high-resolution photography of the Tapestry was taken using a camera mounted on a special gantry; when I arrive, it’s time to move it into its half-a-million-pound showcase and seal it shut. In keeping with the “Silence Please” signs, the atmosphere is hushed as Sarah Choy, a senior collection manager at the museum, gives instructions via a handheld microphone, like a sober MC at a silent disco. Guardrails are erected; chocks are removed from the table’s wheels and placed in purple trays; unfurled winches are connected to the case. “Please release the table brake,” Choy directs. All I can see of the Tapestry, about 15ft away on the other side of a long line of red-and-white hazard tape and the case’s open lid, is a blur of seemingly interlaced, never-ending shapes in an autumnal palette of terracotta, mustard yellow, olive and sage green.
Still, its monumentality is inescapable. Laid out straight and flat in an unbroken, 224ft-long line, this unique survival from the medieval world, consisting of nine conjoined linen panels on to which the story is sewn with woollen yarns, stretches away into the distance, seemingly as lengthy as a runway. It’s the first thing that will strike visitors to the exhibition after they climb a set of stairs (or ascend in a lift) and catch their first glimpse of it from a viewing platform already built for the purpose. On the gallery floor, it takes me more than a minute to walk the Tapestry’s length at a reasonably brisk pace. (The case fits inside the gallery with only inches to spare.) How on earth was such a massive object displayed originally? Nevertheless, the unity of its design is overwhelming. Up close, the wool appears tough and nubby.
The choreography of the Tapestry’s installation, rehearsed last week using a replica, is controlled and efficient, although – and I don’t think this is simply a projection of my nervous excitement – I detect an air of tense concentration. (Critics have suggested that bringing the Tapestry to Britain will damage it.) When a member of the team sneezes, a microscopic stain is perhaps added to the 24,000 documented blemishes – many of them caused by candle wax – that already blight the Tapestry. Another worker, operating within inches of its exposed surface, stumbles over a neon-yellow guardrail not far from the Tapestry’s famous depiction of the Battle of Hastings, in which, amid the melee, frightened, falling horses appear almost upended, head over hooves. “Woah!” she exclaims after standing up, relieved that no damage has been done, instinctively mirroring the cringing pose adopted by Harold Godwinson in the Tapestry when he is seemingly chastised by King Edward. “Apologies, all.”
Nearby, in a scene depicting the consecration of the newly built Westminster Abbey, the hand of God – a little like the giant pointing hand from the National Lottery advertising campaign – seems almost to be tearing through the Tapestry’s fabric: a warning (hopefully not a premonition) of what could happen if something went wrong. “Please be very careful,” Choy reiterates calmly, and work continues at the same methodical pace.
“We have the table in the showcase,” she says a little later, as if reporting that a spacecraft has successfully docked with the International Space Station. Various details of the Tapestry, besides God’s hand, are now visible: eels and a centaur in the lower border; a grizzled King Edward, with a walking stick, in the main frieze; Harold saving a couple of Normans from quicksand; and the moment of his coronation as “Rex Anglorum”.
By 12.20pm, everyone is ready to close the modular case’s angled lids, which remind me, worryingly, of the jaws of a Venus flytrap. Snap, snap, snap: all shut. Phew! A round of applause. “Time for lunch,” Choy announces. Then the three-week process of condition-checking the Tapestry can begin.
The Bayeux Tapestry will open at the British Museum on Sept 10; information: britishmuseum.org
Recommended
A triumph or act of cultural recklessness? The Bayeux Tapestry comes to London
