by Jamie Mulvaney, Seen & Unseen
When history lends us its treasures
Would you insure £800 million for something you don’t own and you can’t keep? Amidst the fanfare and the furore around the delicate delivery of the Bayeux Tapestry, we might keep in mind that we’ve got to give it back.
The something borrowed here isn’t just something old… it’s actually everything to do with the tapestry. The risk, the hotly contested tickets with time-limited viewings, the object itself, and even the name – it’s not really a tapestry at all but an embroidery, perhaps stitched by English women in Canterbury before it ever went to France. Then there’s the awkward reality of the Elgin Marbles down the corridor, and the perpetual will-they-won’t-they question about their loan back to Athens.
Three years ago Andy Burnham said ‘send them back, no strings’, but now as Prime Minister, he’s deferred the decision to the British Museum. It doesn’t have to be an embroidery (or tapestry) for there to be plenty of strings attached.
One of those strings is not only space – where the object is held – but time. Textiles are rationed in ‘lux hours’ – an allowance of light, and the fading is irreversible. Every visitor spends a little of what’s left. So, we’re borrowing from the future as well as the past.
The Director of the British Museum, Nicholas Cullinan, is keenly aware of this, telling the FT, ‘As a museum person, I think you’re always thinking about being a temporary custodian of these objects… you never know how future generations will perceive what you’ve done.’
Which is more or less what King David said several thousand years ago, handing over everything for a temple he’d never see finished, saying to God, ‘For everything is from you, and from your hand we have given to you. For we are strangers before you and sojourners like all our ancestors.’
In that invitation for us to think of ourselves as stewards rather than owners hides a reframing of everything.