A Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts: Their Antiquity, Use, and Symbolic SignificationPugin, Augustus Welby Northmore
History
A Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts: Their Antiquity, Use, and Symbolic Signification
Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore
Screens (Church decoration)
The first is in the Dom or cathedral. It originally consisted of three
moulded arches, springing from slender quatrefoil shafts, supporting an
open gallery. The choir was entered by two doors under the side arches,
while an altar was erected in the centre compartment, and this
arrangement is almost universal in the German screens, reversing the
custom of France and England, of placing the entrance in the centre,
with two lateral altars. This screen received a considerable quantity of
enrichment in the way of imagery and tabernacle-work in the fifteenth
century; the original arches are probably as old as the early part of
the thirteenth. In Lutheran times, a clock has been added on the epistle
side of this screen, which completely destroys its symmetry and
appearance.
Two bays westward of this is a gigantic rood, on a beam, described under
rood beams.
Each lateral chapel is enclosed by open screens, most artificially
wrought in brass, and of great variety of design.
The next most important screen at Lubeck is in the Marienkirche. This
screen consists of five bays, or compartments, with crocketed labels and
images in the spandrels; the masonry is of the fourteenth century, but
the upper panels, containing images and paintings, are not older than
the fifteenth. As this was always a parochial church, the arches are all
open, and filled with light brass-work. I examined them most carefully,
and they evidently had been open according to the original design, nor
were there any marks of altars ever standing under them as at _the
cathedral_. The whole choir of this church, as well as the side chapels,
are enclosed with light and beautiful brass screens, and a very
elaborate screen of carved oak, surmounted by open bratishing, and
basins for tapers, divides off the Lady chapel.
The Katherinen Kirche contains a most beautiful rood screen of very
original design.
The church belonged formerly to religious, and the choir is raised some
eighteen or twenty feet above the level of the church floor, supported
by three ranges of vaulting resting on dwarf marble pillars, and forming
a sort of above-ground crypt. Immediately over the front of these
arches, rises the rood loft, fronted by carved panels, most beautifully
painted with sacred images, and terminated in a very bold floriated
bratishing of admirable execution; in the centre is the great rood, with
the Evangelists in floriated quatrefoils, and the attendant images of
our Blessed Lady and St. John, on octagonal pedestals. At the eastern
end of the lower church is an enclosed choir, divided off by three light
metal screens from the parishioners, so the religious and people had
distinct altars, and were entirely separated in the same church—a most
singular and beautiful arrangement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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