In this joint session on the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, two curators from the British Museum will discuss the museum’s remarkable Bayeux Tapestry exhibition, highlighting its logistical challenges, new research, and the exhibition’s public reception. Iñigo Salto SantamarÃa will then consider the current exhibition in relation to previous shows: the displays at the Louvre in 1803 and 1944, and the failed attempts to loan the tapestry to London in 1932, and to New York in 1946.
Organised by Dr Tom Nickson, Reader in Medieval Art & Architecture, the Courtauld Institute, as part of the Medieval Work-in-Progress Series, in collaboration with the Manton Centre for British Art. This series is also supported by Sam Fogg.
Speakers:
Dr Lloyd de Beer is Curator of Modern European Collections, 1800-Present at the British Museum. He was curator of ‘Thomas Becket: murder and the making of a saint’ in 2021, ‘The Asante Ewer’, and is co-curator of the current Bayeux Tapestry exhibition.
Dr Millie Horton-Insch is an art historian of textiles made in early medieval Britain and Ireland, and Project Curator of the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum. In January 2027 she will start as Lecturer of Dress and Textile Histories at the University of Glasgow.
Dr Iñigo Salto SantamarÃa is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Kunsthistorisches Institut at the University of Zurich. He has published widely on exhibitions of medieval art.
