SCREENS AT LUBECK.
The churches of this ancient city have preserved all their internal fittings as perfectly as those of Nuremberg, although the Catholic rites have ceased within them for nearly three centuries. The minutest ornaments remain intact, and but very trifling additions or alterations have been made in the original arrangement; accordingly, we find splendid examples of screens, which I have figured in the adjoining plates.
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.
The great [Hospital] is constructed like a church, with beds and chambers, open at top, under three vast roofs, covering a nave and aisles. The entrance to this is like a fore choir or antechapel, and dedicated for divine worship. It contains no less than five altars, three of which are under the arches of three screens, the stonework of which is probably the oldest in Lubeck, and to which I should assign the date of the middle of the thirteenth century. The upper part of the loft, consisting of carved panels and paintings, is a work of the fifteenth century.
It is worthy of remark that, although the Lutheran religion has exclusively prevailed in this city for several centuries, many of the branches set up to burn tapers in front of the images in this and other churches bear the date of 1664, and even later.
St. James's church contains several wooden screens of a remarkably early date. They are certainly not later than the middle of the thirteenth century, and are most exquisitely carved with heads of saints, stringcourses, bratishing, images of doctors and evangelists in quatrefoils, and in style of art corresponding to the early work in Wells cathedral.
As this treatise is devoted to the subject of screens, I have confined my remarks to them, but I must add that I consider the churches of Lubeck to be the most interesting, as regards fittings and details, of any ecclesiastical buildings remaining in Europe. There are examples of metal-work, early painting, and wood-carving, of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, and the finest monumental brass in the world, most probably by the same artist as produced the famous one at St. Alban's, but much larger and more elaborate.