Research Notes:
March 2022

Wattenmaker’s attribution seems to be correct. The internal screens at St-Béat vanished long ago (see fig. 5), but a survey of standing monuments, museum fragments, and antiquarian literature affirms that iron screens abounded in churches during the 15th and 16th centuries.² In southern France, for instance, extant screens protect the sanctuaries of the abbey church St-Sernin in Toulouse, the parish church of St-Ebons in Sarrancolin, and the side chapel of the Holy Sepulchre at St-Saturnin in Belpech (figs. 6, 7).³ Most of these screens feature a series of vertical bars held together with entablatures (horizontal bands) of cut-and-pressed sheet metal. The Barnes bands resemble versions from Spain, as witnessed in the book Spanish Ironwork by Arthur Byne and Mildred Stapley (fig. 8), perhaps due to St-Béat’s proximity to the Spanish border and/or the destruction of French material during the French Revolution.

Still, the strongest evidence that the bands come from St-Béat is the appearance of an identical iron band in the church’s north aisle—part of a 20th-century grille sheltering the tomb of Saints Béat and Privat. Documentation presented in the 1930s by Lucien Vignes suggests—but doesn’t prove—that the bands were repurposed in the 1770s to fashion a new baldachin, or canopy, for these saints’ relics when the sanctuary was remodeled (also a likely occasion for the dismantling of a sanctuary screen). Or, perhaps the baldachin is a red herring, and the bands were simply stashed somewhere in the church.⁴

Let’s consider the Barnes bands within the history of St-Béat. A Benedictine monastery was established in the eighth century; it passed into the authority of the priory of St-Pierre-de-Lézat in 1003.⁵ The monks’ “ancient rights and privileges” were restored in the 12th century, and the building’s construction began in 1132.⁶ The monastery was dissolved in the 14th century, and the site became a parish church administered by prieurs and curés (essentially, rectors).⁷

Today, the church retains its 12th-century Romanesque form. The two-story stone structure features three semicircular apses, a four-bay nave with side aisles, and barrel vaulting that spring from columns and pillars carved with checkerboard patterns, grape vines, palmettes, and human and animal figures (figs. 8, 9). The entryway, on the south side, opens onto a relief sculpture (also 12th-century) representing Christ in Majesty surrounded by the tetramorphs. A 16th-century bellcote with two arcades rises above the west facade; perhaps a sanctuary screen was set up during this same period?⁸

If so, the Barnes bands’ allusions to Roman ornament may have honored the church’s Roman-era patron saints. They would, in this case, have built upon the meanings of the existing 12th-century architectural sculpture just described—while also engaging with new Renaissance art from Italy.⁹ Additional symbolism might be found in the bands’ leafiness (possibly referring to the life-giving properties of the sacraments, and the eternal life enjoyed by Christ and his saints) and masks (signifying the act of looking or the state of liminality). Moreover, these objects would have effected a nesting of styles: a Renaissance entablature in a Gothic screen in a Romanesque church. A framework for understanding the layers of architectural ornament can be found in Ethan Kavaler’s book Renaissance Gothic, in which he observed:

Ornament serves many functions: symbolic, communicative, and aesthetic. It can set up successive screens in front of august monuments, endowing vision with mystery . . . It can set up a hierarchy of decorative motifs that the eye charts as a means of establishing some higher order to the structure.¹⁰

Kavaler’s analysis underscores a further point: in the later Middle Ages, screens helped address “modern” devotional and artistic needs within older church buildings. They might divide liturgical spaces; provide opportunities for patrons to flex their piety, status, and taste; or protect private areas while still inviting the public to observe.

To this point, recent scholars of medieval art suggest that worshipers generally understood mass not as an esoteric priestly performance but as a rite unifying them with God, the church, and one another.¹¹ The central event—the priest’s elevation of the consecrated Eucharistic host—was dramatized by ceremonial elaborations: the central gate of the choir screen might be opened, bells rung, candles lit, and a dark curtain drawn behind the altar to increase the host’s visibility.¹²

Paul Binski writes that sanctuary screens “lay at the threshold of a two-way movement, optically in a form of ‘sacramental viewing’ into the chancel, and conversely of the Mystery [of transubstantiation] moving out to meet those in the nave. . . . Partial concealment, like partial clothing, acts to heighten imaginative value and attractiveness.”¹³ To explain this perhaps surprising analogy, Binski references Jean-Paul Sartre’s book Being and Nothingness (1943): “Although I would not for one moment propose an existentialist agenda for the study of the parish church, Sartre has interesting things to say about a consciousness which becomes the thing regarded brought about by the use of a keyhole. Phenomenologically speaking, when seen through a [screen], the Host is, for a moment and in quite a particular sense, the ‘ultimate object.’”¹⁴ This echoes St. John's mystical Vision of the Lamb (fig. 10).

Additionally, Binski’s invocation of Sartre is a useful reminder that the St-Béat iron bands have been agents of aesthetic experience in postmedieval context. It follows that modern and postmodern interpretive frameworks may illuminate phases of their long lives—such as their display at the Barnes (see fig. 1).

The west wall ensemble of Room 4 reveals striking visual affinities between works of art made, for the most part, in late medieval or early modern Western Europe and East Asia. On the left side, a noblewoman from Qing Dynasty China (BF80) and her neighbor Saint Bartholomew (BF833), wielding the knife with which he was flayed, wear rich brocade robes that contrast with monochrome backgrounds (fig. 11). On the right, in a devotional panel made in Siena, Italy, around 1370 (BF792), stippling gives texture to the halos and the Virgin Mary’s “cloth of honor” (fig. 12). Dr. Barnes may have wanted visitors to compare this technique with the egg-and-dart motif wreathing a French Renaissance door-knocker plate nearby (01.04.65) and ethereal sylvan setting of a scroll painting from 15th-century China (BF81) (fig. 13).

Dr. Barnes began collecting metalworks while working with his friend John Dewey on the book Art as Experience in the 1930s.¹⁵ Dewey is usually labeled a pragmatist philosopher, though he preferred “cultural naturalist” to signal the reconstruction of philosophy for a Darwinian, not idealist, worldview.¹⁵ Aesthetic experience, he and Dr. Barnes argued, is not an abstract, transcendent phenomenon but part of the everyday lives of all perceptive human beings. Likewise, they fleshed out the premise that good works of art—no matter the context of their making or purpose—can bridge the experiences of their makers and those who engage seriously with the works’ visual qualities, even centuries later.¹⁶ As a result, the two iron bands seem to fulfill the same essential function at the Barnes as they did at St-Béat—contributing to the process of learning to see.