The Bayeux Tapes­try, one of the most famous arti­facts of its kind, isn’t actu­al­ly a tapes­try. Tech­ni­cal­ly, because the images it bears are embroi­dered onto the cloth rather than woven into it, we should call it the Bayeux Embroi­dery. To quib­ble over a mat­ter like this rather miss­es the point — but then, so does tak­ing too lit­er­al­ly the sto­ry it tells in col­ored yarn over its 224-foot length. Com­mis­sioned, his­to­ri­ans believe, as an apolo­gia for the Nor­man con­quest of Eng­land in 1066, this elab­o­rate work of nar­ra­tive visu­al art con­veys events with a cer­tain slant. But in so doing, the Bayeux’s 75 dra­mat­ic, bloody, rib­ald, and some­times mys­te­ri­ous episodes also cap­ture how peo­ple and things (and even Hal­ley’s Comet) looked in medieval Europe.

It does this in great, if styl­ized detail, at which you can get a clos­er look than has ever before been avail­able to the pub­lic at the Bayeux Muse­um’s web site. The muse­um “worked with teams from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Caen Nor­mandie to dig­i­tize high-res­o­lu­tion images of the tapes­try, which were tak­en in 2017,” says Medievalists.net.

“A sim­ple inter­face was cre­at­ed to access the dig­i­tal ver­sion, which allows users to zoom in and explore it in great detail with access to Latin trans­la­tions in French and Eng­lish.” Made of 2.6 bil­lion pix­els (which brings it to eight giga­bytes in size), the online Bayeux Tapes­try lets us zoom in so far as to exam­ine its indi­vid­ual threads — the same lev­el at which it was inspect­ed in real life ear­li­er last year in antic­i­pa­tion of its next restora­tion.

“A team of eight restor­ers, all spe­cial­ists in antique tex­tiles, car­ried out the detailed inspec­tion in Jan­u­ary 2020, a peri­od when the muse­um was closed to vis­i­tors,” says Medievalists.net. “Among their find­ings were that the tapes­try has 24,204 stains, 16,445 wrin­kles, 9,646 gaps in the cloth or the embroi­dery, 30 non-sta­bi­lized tears, and sig­nif­i­cant weak­en­ing in the first few metres of the work.” (Notably, the col­ors applied in a 19th-cen­tu­ry restora­tion have fad­ed much more than the veg­etable dyes used in the orig­i­nal.) Though cur­rent­ly a bit rough around the edges, the Bayeux Tapes­try looks pret­ty good for its 950 or so years, as any of us can now look more than close­ly enough to see for our­selves. This is a cred­it to its mak­ers — whose iden­ti­ties, for all the scruti­ny per­formed on the work itself, may remain for­ev­er unknown. Explore the high-res­o­lu­tion scan of the Tapes­try here.

via Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine and Medievalists.net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ani­mat­ed Bayeux Tapes­try: A Nov­el Way of Recount­ing The Bat­tle of Hast­ings (1066)

Con­struct Your Own Bayeux Tapes­try with This Free Online App

How the Ornate Tapes­tries from the Age of Louis XIV Were Made (and Are Still Made Today)

160,000 Pages of Glo­ri­ous Medieval Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized: Vis­it the Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

These days, any­one can reach out to hun­dreds of celebri­ties, artists, writ­ers, major heads of state, etc., on social media (or to the interns and assis­tants who run their accounts). Instan­ta­neous con­nec­tion also means hun­dreds of near-instan­ta­neous com­ments in near-real time. It can occa­sion­al­ly mean near-instan­ta­neous influ­encer fame. For 17-year-old Ade­line Har­ris, it would take sev­en years or so to get in touch with 360 of the biggest names in lit­er­a­ture, pol­i­tics, phi­los­o­phy, sci­ence, and oth­er fields of her time. Giv­en that she start­ed in 1856, that’s a some­what extra­or­di­nary feat. It’s only one impres­sive fea­ture of her Tum­bling Block with Sig­na­tures Quilt, most­ly com­plet­ed some­time in 1863.

Har­ris’ quilt­mak­ing project uses a “tum­bling blocks pat­tern,” notes The His­to­ry Blog, “char­ac­ter­ized by a trompe l’oeil that gives it 3D cube effect. [She] show­cased excep­tion­al skill and mas­tery in her needle­work and fab­ric choice, empha­siz­ing the 3D effect with her arrange­ment of the var­ied pat­terns of silk pieces.”

The sig­na­tures on the white dia­monds atop each “tum­bling block” were mailed to Har­ris by request from a “who’s who” of mid-19th cen­tu­ry lumi­nar­ies, includ­ing “an aston­ish­ing eight pres­i­dents of the Unit­ed States (Mar­tin Van Buren, John Tyler, Mil­lard Fill­more, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abra­ham Lin­coln, Andrew John­son, Ulysses S. Grant).”

The quilt also con­tains the sig­na­tures of Union gen­er­als, con­gress­men, jour­nal­ists, aca­d­e­mics, cler­gy­men. Famous names include Samuel Morse, Horace Gree­ley, Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Wal­do Emer­son, Jacob Grimm, Alexan­der von Hum­boldt, Hen­ry Wadsworth Longfel­low, Julia Ward Howe, Har­ri­et Beech­er Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, Alexan­dre Dumas, Oliv­er Wen­dell Holmes, William Make­peace Thack­er­ay, and Charles Dick­ens. She placed the names in cat­e­gories divid­ing the sig­na­to­ries by pro­fes­sion.

The full list “is noth­ing short of phe­nom­e­nal,” the Pub­lic Domain Review writes, adding that “accord­ing to her grand-daugh­ter the Lin­coln sig­na­ture was, due to a fam­i­ly con­nec­tion, actu­al­ly acquired in per­son, and Ade­line was meant to have even danced with Lin­coln at his inau­gu­ra­tion ball.” Har­ris — lat­er Ade­line Har­ris Sears — came from a wealthy Rhode Island tex­tile mill fam­i­ly and mar­ried a promi­nent cler­gy­man. She spent most of her life in the state, and mailed most of her sig­na­ture requests rather than deliv­er­ing them first­hand.

Sig­na­ture quilts were not new; they had been sewn for years to mark fam­i­ly occa­sions and oth­er events. But nev­er had they been a means of celebri­ty auto­graph-hunt­ing, nor been cre­at­ed by a sin­gle indi­vid­ual. Col­lect­ing auto­graphs, how­ev­er, was quite pop­u­lar. “Adeline’s taste for auto­graphs… betrays her roman­tic nature,” writes Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art cura­tor Amelia Peck. “Among a cer­tain seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion, it was believed that a person’s sig­na­ture revealed sig­nif­i­cant aspects of his or her per­son­al­i­ty.”

It’s hard not to see the seeds of our con­tem­po­rary cul­ture in the con­sump­tion of celebri­ty auto­graphs Peck describes: “By own­ing a sig­na­ture of an illus­tri­ous per­son, one could learn about the char­ac­ter­is­tics that made him or her great and emu­late those traits.” This mania for auto­graphs “par­al­leled the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry fas­ci­na­tion with oth­er types of pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic per­son­al­i­ty dis­cov­ery, such as phrenol­o­gy.” There were deep, mys­ti­cal mean­ings in Ade­line’s quilt, wrote edi­tor Sarah Hale, who also donat­ed a sig­na­ture. In her 1868 book Man­ners, Hap­py Homes and Good Soci­ety All the Year Round, Hale explained what made the quilt a mas­ter­piece:

In short, we think this auto­graph bedquilt may be called a very won­der­ful inven­tion in the way of needle­work. The mere mechan­i­cal part, the num­ber of small pieces, stitch­es neat­ly tak­en and accu­rate­ly ordered; the arrang­ing prop­er­ly and join­ing nice­ly 2780 del­i­cate bits of var­i­ous beau­ti­ful and cost­ly fab­rics, is a task that would require no small share of res­o­lu­tion, patience, firm­ness, and per­se­ver­ance. Then comes the intel­lec­tu­al part, the taste to assort col­ors and to make the appear­ance what it ought to be, where so many hun­dreds of shades are to be matched and suit­ed to each oth­er. After that we rise to the moral, when human deeds are to live in names, the con­sid­er­a­tion of the celebri­ties, who are to be placed each, the cen­tre of his or her own cir­cle! To do this well requires a knowl­edge of books and life, and an instinc­tive sense of the fit­ness of things, so as to assign each name its suit­able place in this galaxy of stars or dia­monds.

See more close-ups of the quilt at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, who hold this one-of-a-kind work of sig­na­to­ry fab­ric art in their col­lec­tions.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Solar Sys­tem Quilt: In 1876, a Teacher Cre­ates a Hand­craft­ed Quilt to Use as a Teach­ing Aid in Her Astron­o­my Class

Too Big for Any Muse­um, AIDS Quilt Goes Dig­i­tal Thanks to Microsoft

Bisa Butler’s Beau­ti­ful Quilt­ed Por­traits of Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, Nina Simone, Jean-Michel Basquiat & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.