Art of Diplomacy: Cultural Gifts Have Long Played a Part in Global Relations

This week's masterclass in the renewal of the entente cordiale was based on a desire by two countries to reconnect.

- Patrick Wintour

But it also served as a reminder not only that diplomacy is an art but also that art itself has always been an essential tool of diplomacy. So the extended loan of the Bayeux tapestry, exchanged with treasures from Sutton Hoo, is not just a gesture of trust but marks a return to the roots of diplomacy, and its cultural lure.

Doubtless, security experts will remember the summit's declarations of new nuclear cooperation while pollsters will monitor the "one in, one out" migrant deal. But the popular legacy will be the queues forming at the British Museum from September 2026 when the tapestry goes on display, and in Rouen and Caen when the treasures from Sutton Hoo are viewed by the French in what is already being billed as the "year of the Normans".

True, some Telegraph readers are spluttering about the French sending a reminder of their conquest of the Anglo-Saxons, or that Britain is just a convenient place to dump the cloth during the two-year closure of the Bayeux Museum, but the British Museum is rubbing its hands at the likely popular response.

Art and antiques, alongside silk fabrics, animals and inventions, have always been the mainstay of the diplomatic gift, the entry point and sometimes the centre point for any communication.

In academic literature art has been described as the mute diplomat. Anthony Colantuono, a historian of early modern diplomacy, says artworks both as gifts and on display are not peripheral accessories to political action but are in themselves instruments of diplomatic persuasion or seduction.