 When George Gilbert Scott's magnificent choir screen in Hereford Cathedral was removed in 1967, just about a century after its installation, there were various reasons cited. Liturgical changes that made such partitions less desirable, conservation problems with the metalwork, and not least aesthetic considerations. It was a spiky, blatant vulgarity in the eyes of some critics, and an incongruous, over-obtrusive addition to the spacious medieval interior. Remarkably similar assessments laid behind the removal of screens from churches all over Europe in the centuries after the Reformation. Most of the great screens of Gothic France, like this one at Schott, which rose in tandem with or just slightly after the construction of the edifices in the 13th century, were not dismantled by iconoclastic reformers or revolutionists, but rather by well-intentioned clergy in the 17th century who were eager to open up their chancel areas to better view, if not necessarily to physical access as the impenetrable iron grills that replaced the screens often make plain. And they wanted to make these interiors more luminous and less fussily segmented. In Germany, many communities that converted to Protestantism chose to spare their screens, as here at Naumburg Cathedral, so that they could simply cordon off the elitist space of the choir and perform all the liturgies in the nave. In both cases, the aim was to create, or at least simulate, a unity and cohesiveness of sacred space. But the medieval aesthetic system, if we can really talk about such a thing, seems to have been very much more open to complexity, difficulty, and fragmentation than the one that shapes modern sensibilities and liturgical needs. Churchgoers expected to encounter these interiors dynamically in a process of movement, and they seem to have relished the diversity of vistas and perspectives that the partitioning of space has created. Their rituals revolved around the dialectic of revelation and concealment. They focused, after all, on the marvelous, if imperceptible transformation of ordinary bread into the divine body in the Eucharist. They involved the barely audible whispering of the most potent prayer of consecration and the obfuscatory power of a foreign that is Latin language. Screens, of course, served important practical functions of demarcating distinct liturgical spaces, protecting treasured objects, and serving as monumental sound amplifiers. In continental examples, they were surmounted by platforms whence clerics could address large congregations in the nave. But on a more symbolic level, they served to materialize and enact the process of Christian revelation. After all, revelation, visibility, access, clarity, cannot exist without some form of obscurity first. Now, the analogies I'm about to draw concerning the term screen are anachronistic, to be sure, but I think they're more in tune with medieval sensibilities than modern descriptions of screens as unwieldy, cumbersome intrusions are. First, I think we can usefully consider the choir screens of Gothic churches the sort Scott was seeking to emulate as a medieval version of a cinematic screen. We encounter them as surfaces that present what I think of as moving pictures. In many cases, narrative reliefs, as here at Naumburg, that depict moments in sacred history in rather astonishingly engaging, relatable ways. Or standing statues of saints and angels that would surely have taken on an impression of liveliness when beheld through the smoke of incense and candles and the sounds of polyphonic chant. As such, the screen, interesting in its own right, also becomes a vibrant, flickering backdrop for the masses that were performed at the altars in the crossing or nave, the rituals that laity were most likely to attend. Here, the 15th-century painter Roger van der Weyden is helping us visualize the appearance of a priest and his attendant during the climax of the mass in front of the beautiful early 14th-century screen at Oberwesel in the Rhineland. As he elevates the host, you can see the great altar piece in the apse which was made and installed concurrently with the screen as part of a unified visual and liturgical program glittering through the arch doorway of the screen central bay. And here's a closer view with the doors fully open. The windows to either side with their bar tracery allowed the devout to peek into the choir thus people could still adore the consecrated host in its little tabernacle, which you see here, even when the choir was locked. The sense of visual porousness we observe here at Oberwesel is characteristic of many Gothic screens from the continent which typically featured either one large central door leading into the choir or two side doors with an altar at the center. And it's also characteristic of the slightly later, more plainer screens in English churches as here at Ranworth which often had a solid lower wall painted in bright colors or carved with elaborate ornamentation and capped by a latticework or wooden grill through which lay people could look easily into the choir. Sometimes also including squints or other small windows as here at Marburg even the more bulky varieties of choir screens invite a second anachronistic but nonetheless appropriate comparison. The modern window screen, a form of partition that accommodates the easy passage of various sensory stimuli, views as well as sounds and smells, while still defining distinctive zones. Late medieval and early modern depictions of Gothic choir screens in action characteristically feature little people looking across the threshold of doors or gates as here in the Master of Saint Bertin Altarpiece in Berlin. And they often allow us, the picture's viewers, to catch at least a glimpse of the people and furnishings beyond. The Gothic choir screen then creates a tension within the church between its immutable physical presence that is its ability to divide and structure space and its permeability that is the creation of limited, focused and thus all the more potent connections between spaces. It constantly oscillates between its identity as something that we look at and something that we look through between being a subject of vision and a frame for vision. I've written about this principle in my book The Gothic Screen but I'd like to take up the issue again here with respect to two very interesting monuments that I did not consider in that forum. The screen in the Abbey Church of Saint Mary in Vecilano and that in the Minster of Saint Stephen in Breisach on the Rhine. Though the screens were separated by nearly 300 years both reside in churches that were erected around the turn of the 13th century and both form the centerpiece and we might say the focalizer of iconographic programs that unite the entire longitudinal space of the church from the western entrance to the apps in the east. Let's begin with Vecilano, a beautiful abbey church in the rolling hills of the Piedmont region of northern Italy built in the late 12th century. Walking up to the West facade, we're greeted by a sculpted figure of Christ himself along with a pair of saints and angels hovering high overhead and our movement into the church is marked by the image of God entering the world in the form of a dove that flies into the Virgin Mary's ear. Now this being a monastery church and a relatively remote one at that the nave that we step into which is reserved for lay visitors is comparatively short compared with a spacious choir beyond. From our standpoint here at the entrance we see two huge vaults extending beyond our zone which canopied the large space in which the resident brothers perform the divine office throughout the day and night. What dominates our vision here in the nave is a great partitioning structure with a pair of altars in the side bays and a large central opening. The screen seems to have been conceived and designed as the church rose in the 1180s but the very close connection that both the figural style and the painting techniques of the sculptures bears to the painted portal of Lausanne Cathedral suggests that the screen was not finished until around 1230. A last-minute change of plans for the Basilica's design led to the truncation of the screen. You can see how the outer arches of the arcade seem to grow straight out from the walls and you can also note that the sculpture program of the upper level actually had to be continued in paint on the adjacent pier. In any case, this is the earliest example of a historiated choir screen in Europe that survives in C2 and it affirms that the dual nature of the choir screen as a thing to be looked both at and through was integral to its identity from the beginning. The upper level of the Vettolano's screen features an array of images that are closely linked to popular themes in the sculpted portal programs being made in early 13th century France. It is like a tympanum, like the one here at the Chartes-North-Transcept, stretched out laterally. A continuous band of seated prophets, each holding a banderole with his name, anchors the marine iconography at once displaying the Virgin's royal ancestry and demonstrating the foundational role of the Old Testament texts. The New Testament age, embodied by the four evangelist symbols, the eagle and ox, lion and man, forms the frame for the main scenes of the upper register. At left, the dormition or death of the Virgin. At the right, her ascension into heaven and in the center, her coronation by her son which establishes her as the eternal Queen of Heaven. This monastery was dedicated to the Virgin Mary so this iconography is hardly surprising but it may seem strange when we think about the close relationship of this structure to the altars, not to see any sign here of incarnational imagery. Reminders that Mary was the bearer of the human Christ and this is where spatial integration comes into play. Let's consider first where we're standing when we look at the screen. Remember we're in quite a shallow space. Here's the ground plan. Masses were performed for lay visitors at these two side altars flanking the doorway. But if we want to get a good view of the priest and the host he consecrates, we have little luck if we stand right behind them facing the altar head on, completely blocked by these little columns. This is not the case when we stand on the central axis. In line with the main doorway of the screen, look, from here we get a beautiful open view of each side altar and looking straight ahead we get a framed vista onto the main altar deep in the apps. Now today this altar bears a very tall wooden late Gothic reddible which blocks our view of the windows. But if we imagine this away or we step closer to the threshold, we can notice two figures carved into the impulse of the central window of the apps. These are the angel Gabriel on the left pointing his finger in speech and Virgin Mary on the right lifting her palm toward him in a gesture of attentive receptiveness. They were made by the same sculptors who carved the images on the screen. The annunciation thus plays out across the arch of the window identifying the light that pours through as an index of divine presence. And the scene forms the visual and conceptual centerpiece of the screen's pictorial program. Beheld through the doors we see this foundational moment of contact between human and divine enter into dialogue with the scene of eternal cosmic rulership above. And we see it activate and sanctify this potent threshold, the doors, where the church's two primary spaces converge. You may recall that the annunciation in a decidedly more literal guise also crowned the tympanum leading into the church. So the screen, which, like Mary's own body in the eyes of Christian theologians, is both solid and penetrable, stands at the center of these two portrayals of incarnation and offers a space for the altars where Christ will become present again during every Eucharistic ritual. A similar dynamic in which spatially disparate but thematically linked images get telescope around the choir screen can be observed in the collegiate church, or minster, in Breisach on the Rhine River. The church itself was built around the same time as that in Vettelano in the latter decades of the 12th century, and in this case extending well into the 13th. But the town's burgeoning prosperity in the 15th century led to some late Gothic expansions and embellishments, which you can see in this exterior view with the fancy eastern choir jutting out from the blocky towers. The culmination of this new program was a breathtaking high altar in the apse, fashioned between 1523 and 1526 by a woodcarver known as Master H.L., possibly identical with a certain Hans Loy who was active in the Rhineland around this time. Resting on a prodella with the four evangelists who are depicted as vigorous men of different ages, the main shrine shares its basic iconography with the screen at Vettelano. Although in this case, it's not only Christ who crowns the Virgin in heaven, but also God the Father with his exuberant beard and the Holy Spirit who descends from the canopy of foliage above. Male saints and dapper, finery stand guard in the side wings, the early martyrs Stephen and Lawrence on the left, and the city patrons Prothesius and Gervaisius on the right whose relics resided elsewhere in the church. And another cluster of holy figures occupies the lofty superstructure known as a gespringae at the very top. While angels play musical instruments at the far sides, St. Anne with Mary and the Christ child sits enthroned at the center and way up in the vault perches the adult Christ showing the wounds of the passion as the man of sorrows. The altar piece is rightly famous both for the almost manic flamboyance of its carving and for its celebration of the warm surfaces of the wood. The wood is indeed treated with a light glaze and as you can see the skin of the main figures is painted with delicate nearly translucent layers of flesh-toned pigments to enhance the impression of liveliness. They're highly responsive to the play of light as it flows into the space through the neighboring windows. As majestic as the altar appears when seen as a whole from a vantage point here in the choir where the resident religious community sat, it assumes different nuances when it's seen from outside. That is when you move toward it along the nave. For the scenery of the altar piece emerges in a gradual process coming to view through the central arched opening of the choir screen. Now this screen already stood in place at the time Master H.L. took up his chisel though it was still relatively new. The dating is not precise but we know it was underway shortly after 1490. The screen like that at Vecilano is a deep structure with an upper platform in this case it contains five large vaulted bays. Today the three central bays are totally open both to the front and back of the structure making the screen look more like just a space marker than a really effective partition. This was a modification made in the 1950s when as in Hereford congregants and clergy agreed that the medieval version of the screen was really too glaring in obstruction to their view and use of the space. Here is a 19th century photograph of the screen in its original form though with more recent paint. In its original form the screen housed three altars two in the outermost bays then a pair of arched doors and then a central altar backed by a large aperture that opened onto a view of the high altar and you can see diamond patterns of the grills that were being used in the 19th century as partitions. We have to keep these changes in mind when we chart the visual effects of the screen on the altar piece but what's important is that the central opening we'll be focusing on was part and parcel of the screen's original design even if it's somewhat wider today and that Master H.L. surely undertook his creation with this framing device in mind. In the playfulness of its ornamentation the altar piece complements the screen beautifully though the screen's design is far looser more lightweight and airy. Above each bay an og arch curves upward growing into a finial that sprouts a massive foliage near its peak. These spiky crowns alternate with slender gothic spires that likewise spring up far above the screen's upper balustrade with its swirls of irregular tracery forms. These spires in turn form baldikines over the heads of the figures that stand in the spandrels across the screen's facade and flanks. Once again an elegantly crowned Virgin Mary this time holding the baby Jesus the three magi bearing gifts and the same resident saints who would also find their way into the main altar piece. Little leaves seem to sprout from the moldings of the arches calling our attention to the fish bladder decorations in the spandrels. Every open surface is filled with visual interest. This tendency carries over to the apertures at the arcade level. Now you'll notice that each of the tracery designs over the four lateral bays differs from the others. Arches spring from the piers and then stop or sweep up to intersect with or loop around others yielding a sequence of intricate lacy figures that embellish the entire arched opening of each bay. Not so in the central bay where a series of cusped micro arches obediently follow the curve of the main arch opening up a view to the space beyond. The image we see through this frame shifts as we walk the length of the nave. Let's start way back at the western end. You can see that this nave is considerably longer than that at Vetzalano attesting to the large lay congregation in what had become a thriving imperial city. From this distant view we can clearly see the Gespranga with the man of sorrows seeming to hover weightless above the glowing lancet window. Here we zoom in a little bit making the place of the high altar visible throughout the church. A pair of saints joins the community of holy figures lining the screen's facade. Through the aperture and you must remember that there was originally an altar in the lower zone of this bay. We see the high altar in the apps presided over by the evangelists the men who of course mediated God's word to the Christian community in the form of the gospels which were read loud often from the top of the choir screen during the first part of the liturgy. As we walk along the nave the saintly figures on the Gespranga get hidden behind the choir screen but the vision of heavenly celebration in the central shrine comes slowly into view. First Mary emerges the physical mediator of the divine to the human. Look at how the cusped arch of the screen's frontal plane curves around her head like a giant halo as she slides into view. A little closer and we see Christ and God the Father whose material forms so Christian theologians taught we can only access through her. And finally most ethereal and distant the Holy Spirit fluttering over the whole scene. I particularly like this view taken quite close to the screen a point where lay observers could have stood to attend masses at the central altar. It lets us see the visual rhymes that pull together the foliate arch that encompasses Master H.L.'s trinity and the cusped arches that frame the vista through the screen's central bay. From this point of view we can take the coronation scene as part of a larger visual field that extends upward to the finial at the top of the og arch. Mary's body and the crown that the deity dangles over her head fall into a direct axis with the city's coat of arms at the apex of the screen's central vault. And then with a bust-length angel in clerical garb who gazes outward from the spandrel above the opening. The next part is harder to photograph than to see with your own eyes but if you look a little higher you can see the head and shoulders of the man of sorrows from the altar piece's gesprange through the triangular opening of the og she arches upper point above the balustrade. From one end of the church to the other this eucharistic figure sign of both sacrifice and salvation is always present in watching. Now, I don't want to place too much weight on this point or suggest that Master H.L. and his assistants plotted the height of Christ's perch to match this tiny aperture from a certain standpoint. This particular conjunction of elements may be no more than the happy accident resulting from the choir screen designer's celebration of open forms. But the axial alignment of these key iconographic elements between altar piece and choir screen is no accident nor is the placement of the man of sorrows at such a height where he is always visible above and beyond the choir screen even if at certain times of day he was backlit by the windows and thus available just as a silhouette. A reminder of St. Paul's description of our earthly pre-resurrection vision of God as being through a glass darkly rather than face to face. And what did this Christ see from his lofty perspective? He saw not just humanity's activities in the choir and nave but also his own mirror image still clad only in a loincloth and cape but now enthroned and raising his hands in the process of judgment. The painter Martin Schoengauer created this fresco of the end of time between 1488 and 1491. It was his last major commission before his own death in 1491 and it was the last thing visitors to the church at Breisach saw before they returned to the ordinary world. This eschatological vision fills not only the entire western wall which you see here but also the adjacent north and south walls which depict the entryways to hell and to heaven. The elect, incidentally, pass through a portal you can just see them here at the upper part of this wall. They're passing into a portal capped with a cusped arch tracery and into a structure crowned by another traceried balustrade from which angels sing. One is tempted to think that Schoengauer had a sneak preview of the choir's screen's design which was in progress at the time he was working. The angels inhabited a very, very similar structure here. By using all three adjacent wall surfaces the painter essentially made the western end of the church into a monumental painted triptych a supersized winged altarpiece like that Master H.L. would make a generation later. The colors, as you can see, are extremely faded. They were whitewashed during the 17th and 18th centuries just as so many choir screens were being removed elsewhere on the continent and they were only rediscovered in the 1930s. Both Master H.L. and his team and the men who made the choir screen went about their work in the figurative shadow of these brand new paintings which comprised the largest last judgment scene in northern Europe by the most eminent painter in the region. It set a very high standard. The eschatological theme with its stern warning to ordinary men and women who may have recognized themselves and the bodies that rise from their graves in the lower zone right next to the store was complimented in H.L.'s jubilant image of heavenly community. And the choir screen designer opted to frame his view of the western wall with a quieter scene of divine human interaction. A sculpted enunciation like that at Vecilano playing out over the central arch of the screen's reverse side. With a bust-length image of God the Father presiding over the dialogue between Gabriel and Mary to either side of the door, the cusped arches of the door's tracery now serve to highlight the figures of Mary and John the Baptist on the western wall. They're interceding for humanity tempering the righteous anger of Christ the Judge as they implore him for mercy on sinners. Although the Bryzach Church was dedicated to St. Stephen, Mary is the thread that pulls the building together as Queen of Heaven in the altar piece, as Queen of Earth when she receives gifts from the magi on the screen's facade, as gracious intercessor at the end of time on the western wall and as the handmaiden of the Lord preparing to give God material form on the screen's reverse. As a bearer of and frame for potent iconography and as a bridge and a divider between sacred spaces, the choir screens at Bryzach, Vecilano, Oberweselschacht, Herford, and so many other places also serve as mediators. The screen may be the place where realms and people are divided as at the last judgment, but also as the iconography so often emphasizes, they're the place where heaven and earth converge. In modern conditions of church going, when people expect to sit in one place and watch the mass unfold at a single functional altar, it's understandable that screens would be perceived as a frustrating hindrance to vision. But in the dynamic environment of medieval architecture, where masses were performed throughout the day at various altars and people moved about in the course of rituals, screens anchored and activated the entire church interior. Did the removal of screens in later centuries really make the visual experience of churches better? It certainly made seeing the choir space easier. But with the disappearance of screens, the dynamism of the church interior is muted. Altar pieces, windows, wall paintings, and other media of liturgy become mere artifacts, things that can be absorbed from a single standpoint with a single glance. No longer things that can surprise and delight the mind and create focal points for the gaze. Within their church environments, choir screens were and remain instruments of recognition and agents of revelation. Screens in their churches may be beautiful on their own, but they're impoverished without each other.