Boundaries, Passages, and the Movement of Media: The Painted Screen-Walls of Franciscan Observant Churches in the Italian Alps

Among the choir screens still extant in medieval European churches, the seven painted screen-walls (Lettnerwände) in the Franciscan Observant churches of Lombardy, Piedmont, and Ticino occupy an art historical space of special complexity. Fashioned in the liminal space of the Italian Alps, they fuse Italian and Germanic stylistic and formal patterns, and ground their Renaissance innovations in deep medieval traditions. These tendencies come to view above all in the screens’ play of media, as painters transformed solid walls into simulacra of altarpieces, veils, sculptural installations, visionary scenarios, and landscapes both local and foreign. This artistic testing of boundaries is in keeping with the screens’ own status as liturgical partitions, which created discrete spaces for the friars and the lay visitors to whose spiritual life they needed to tend. This research seminar makes the case that these screens, in their painted imagery, formed a kind of vivid visual communication that enhanced – and even exceeded – what the friars could convey in words, and offered viewers possibilities of imaginative travel beyond what their natural environment allowed.

Jacqueline Jung is Professor of History of Art and Medieval Studies at Yale University, where she has taught since 2007. She is the author of The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200-1400 (2013) and Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture (2020). Her current book-in-progress, co-written with the scholar of African-American art Isaac Jean-François, is tentatively called Bodies, Fragments, Transcendence: Medieval and Black Arts in Conversation.

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Scientific Organization: Stephanie Wisowaty and Elisabetta Scirocco