Screen, Window, Door: Three Devices to Understand Animation in the Middle Ages

What holds together three cultural objects as different as the Fastentucher, the Flugelaltare, and the Vierges Ouvrantes? Developing recent research on medieval sculpture and a genealogical reconsideration of screens, this chapter contends that these objects were 'environmental media' embedded in ephemeral and contingent situations that deeply affected their own reception and interpretation. Indeed, each of these objects was intended not so much as an 'optical device,' to be contemplated from afar, but as a located assembly of components, needs, practices, actors, and circumstances that triggered a specific set of internal operations and a corresponding set of practices that primarily depended on the 'positioning' of the objects and their beholders. Such an approach will fully restore not only the mode of working of these four objects but also their interrelated meaning, against the background of the medieval Christian thought as an 'imaginal thought'. What is at stake is a 'discipline of vision.'