LONDON.- “Disappointed Love,” painted in 1821 by Irish artist Francis Danby, is a scene of eternal teenage wistfulness, its visual codes as readable now as they were back then. A young girl sits by a river, tearful and heartbroken, her head in her hands, her white dress pooling around her legs. In the water, pages of a torn letter float among the waterlilies. By her side are props of femininity: a straw bonnet, a bright red shawl and a miniature portrait of the man who wronged her.

The work hangs in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, in a red-walled gallery tightly packed with Georgian and Victorian paintings. As of recently, Danby’s weeping beauty has a new neighbor: a ruffled cream Zimmerman dress worn by Taylor Swift in the music video for “Willow,” from her 2020 album “Evermore.”

The gown is one of more than a dozen items from Swift’s personal archive featured in installations across the V&A galleries. Danby’s painting is “so her vibe,” curator Kate Bailey said of Swift, gesturing to the lovesick girl and her assortment of trinkets — “the dress, the scarf.”

It was not yet noon on a muggy July day, and yet Bailey, a senior curator in the V&A theater and performance department, had already clocked more than 8,000 steps on her iPhone pedometer as she rushed about the museum overseeing the Taylor Swift installation. The V&A galleries, on multiple floors, stretch 7 miles. (The exhibition, “Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail,” will be open to the public through Sept. 8.)

“Whose idea was it to put a trail around the whole museum?” Bailey asked as she arrived, cheerful and panting, in the gilded Norfolk House Music Room. The V&A acquired the room in 1938, when Norfolk House was demolished, and reassembled it in its entirety, panel by panel, in 2000.

Swift’s “Speak Now” blasted from speakers, and her iridescent tulle ballgown, worn on the album’s back cover, was on a mannequin in a vitrine in the center of the room, like a ballerina in a giant music box.

Elsewhere, Bailey had placed the red puff-sleeve Tadashi Shoji gown Swift wore in the video for “I Bet You Think About Me” next to a colossal velvet-draped four-poster bed, commissioned by the Earl of Melville in 1700 to convey status and political success. Swift’s Reputation Tour costumes, including Gucci boots decorated with snakes, sat in a spot usually occupied by “The Three Graces,” Antonio Canova’s white marble sculpture depicting Zeus’ three daughters entwined in a sisterly hug.

“Old masters, new masters,” Bailey said as installers positioned a sequin catsuit by Zuhair Murad from Swift’s “1989” tour by the Raphael Cartoons, commissioned in 1515 by Pope Leo X for the Sistine Chapel.

The works, some of the most treasured examples of Renaissance art, belong to the king, “so obviously anything done has to be very respectful,” Bailey explained as she adjusted a layer of protective fabric to shield Swift’s bedazzled flesh-tone look.

“I’m feeling quite positive, though, because William and family went to the tour,” she said. (The prince was captured on film with his children at an Eras Tour performance in June, dancing to “Shake It Off.”)

The exhibition’s “trail” format, Bailey said, is a nod to the singer’s famous “Easter eggs,” her habit of littering subtle messages and clues across her visuals and lyrics. The number of exhibits displaying her dresses and costumes is 13, Swift’s lucky number. None of this will be lost on Swift fans who take an approach to visual analysis that sways between the forensic and the fantastical, or even the amusingly paranoid.

The idea of a Swift-themed display occurred to Bailey in April, shortly after the Eras Tour began. The tour was already bolstering national economies, having become the first ever to make $1 billion.

“We knew we’d have to be resourceful,” Bailey said, noting that the museum had had to repurpose various existing vitrines because of the rush. “It’s been the fastest-moving project I’ve worked on.”

Now, as she moves through the galleries, she views the V&A collection through the prism of Swift, attuned to the plethora of cats across the objects, the appearance of various snakes or guitars.

By clashing Swiftian artifacts with historical treasures, Bailey’s curation makes explicit the project’s intentions: to bring in new blood among the old. The V&A curatorial team hopes that while admiring the cardigan from “Folklore” — displayed in an elegant gallery dedicated to landscapes — a new audience may cast their eyes over a neighboring Constable or Turner and feel some, if not an equal level of, excitement.

The Taylor Swift show marks a moment of overt celebrity association for the museum. Other current exhibitions are dedicated to model Naomi Campbell and the photographic collection of Elton John. The museum, like many others, is in the market for crowd-pleasing exhibitions. Visitor numbers, while rising, still lag well below prepandemic attendance figures. The Swift exhibition is free, intended to entice teenagers and 20-somethings attending the next London leg of the Eras Tour in August.

Back downstairs, Swift’s Victorian-style faux leather skirt and blouse, worn in the video for “Fortnight” from “The Tortured Poets Department,” sat next to the Foggini marble of Samson slaying a Philistine with the jawbone of an ass.

As Bailey admired the contrast between the installations, exhibition designer Tom Piper, a celebrated theater designer best known for his work on Shakespeare productions, wandered over. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and shorts and a look of merry bemusement. Before working on this project, he was not, he admitted, a Swift connoisseur. The appeal for him, he said, has been learning about the complex layers of visual narratives within her work: the references to literature, nature, art and folklore, and to her own past work.

When first approached by the V&A about the project, Piper was asked to sign a lengthy nondisclosure agreement to avoid news of the show leaking. Only a handful of staff members knew about the concept.

“I’ve never been on a project that had to be so secret,” said Piper, who has five daughters, from 16 to 30, three of whom have tickets to Swift’s August shows at Wembley Stadium. He said research for the project required him to skulk about his house and slam his laptop shut whenever one of his daughters appeared.

Not everyone will “get” the exhibition, Bailey acknowledged. Some of her juxtapositions nod to the criticism that Swift has encountered across her career. On one of the first stops of the trail, the Versace shirt, cropped wig and stick-on facial hair Swift wore in the “I’m the Man” video — in which she challenges sexist double standards in the creative fields — is positioned in front of mosaic portraits of some of art’s great men from the 1860s and ’70s: Hans Holbein, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Christopher Wren. The figures glisten, looking down imposingly from up high.

Broadly speaking, Swift may be something of a curator’s dream, given her fascination with objects. She flaunts her collecting impulse, and her story — and various reinventions — is inextricably connected to an array of artifacts.

“There is a really great way that she relates to things, whether it’s mirrors, snakes, cardigans or other objects,” Bailey said. Her use of objects and emblems as a means of communication — part of her arsenal of weapons in feuds or reputational battles — is suited to a space dedicated to visual codes made tangible, to the treasured relics of the great and the powerful.

Taylor Swift must be refreshing, Bailey mused, for an audience so often preoccupied with the digital. “She lands them in a place that feels real,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.