Lunchtime Lecture: Photographing the Bayeux Tapestry

In 1872, a young British photographer named Edward Dossetter stood face-to-face with the famous embroidery known as the Bayeux Tapestry. Dossetter had been sent to France from London to photograph the Tapestry in its entirety for the South Kensington Museum (later renamed the V&A). In this talk, curators Ella Ravilious and Silvija Banić will examine the earlier surviving records of the Tapestry, and how Dossetter’s photographs can be observed within the context of these visual sources. They will explore how photography aided scholarship on the Bayeux Tapestry and promoted its understanding in Britain, and will ask: why was the South Kensington Museum so invested in replicating the Tapestry through photographic means? Join us for a talk dedicated to the history of this important resource, and its relevance for the future research of the most important textile artefact from the Medieval period.

Ella Ravilious is Curator: Architecture and Design in the Art, Architecture, Photography and Design Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She is also studying for a PhD in the history of the V&A’s Photography Collection at the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester. With Professor Elizabeth Edwards she recently co-edited the volume What Photographs Do: The Making and Remaking of Museum Cultures, published by UCL Press in November 2022.

Silvija Banić is Curator of Textiles before 1800 in the Performance, Furniture, Textiles and Fashion Department. Before becoming responsible for the V&A’s collection of European Medieval and Early Modern textiles, she has been intensely dedicated to a ‘hands-on’ research of historic textiles in Croatia and Italy since 2007 and has published and presented extensively on the subject up to this day. Immediately prior to her joining the Museum in 2018 she was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice.

To see our full Summer 2023 Lunchtime Lecture Programme, click 'Download Programme' on the right of this screen.