English Panel Paintings 1400-1558

The art of East Anglia was pre-eminent during the late thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth century. Wooden screens with painted panels were one of the most essential fittings of late pre-Reformation churches, serving both to protect the high altar and to define the division between the chancel and the nave and aisles. Whereas very few screens dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries survive, the surviving fifteenth-century rood-screen paintings in East Anglia form the largest body of late mediaeval painting to be found in England. Details of more than a thousand panels from more than one hundred screens are listed, described and in many cases illustrated in this volume accompanied by commentaries on their design, techniques and materials used in their making and how they were paid for.