Lisbon is a city of prospects, and, uninteresting as are its main streets, it is only necessary to stand upon one of its many eminences to see spread before you a wide and varied panorama. The end windows of the upper corridors in the Hotel de Bragança afford a splendid view of the port and the mouth of the Tagus, whilst from the ancient citadel of St. Jorge, and from the dome of the big classical church of Estrella, the city and the rolling hills for miles around are spread out at the foot like a map in relief. Speaking for myself, I have always considered one of the most attractive coigns of vantage in Lisbon to be the Largo da Gloria just over the entrance of the Avenida. This can be reached either up the Rua de São Roque or by the funicular lift from the Avenida itself. The view from this pretty public garden on the top of a precipitous bluff is charming. The whole of the central valley lies under you with its straight lines of streets, starting from the great parallelogram of the Rocio just below and reaching the Tagus. Just in front of you across the valley rise the hills covered with houses of all colours amidst greenery, with the great old citadel of the Moors and their conquerors crowning the highest point towards the river; the square battlemented towers of the old cathedral being seated upon a lower hill at its foot. To the left an ocean of mountainous hills covered with verdure and buildings stretch as far as the eye reaches; whilst on the right beyond the extensive Black Horse Square shines the wide estuary of the river, and miles away across the water the mountains that bound the prospect towards the south.
As you stand and look down from the garden of Gloria to the big busy square, with its wavy black and white pavement, and tall column just underneath you, you may notice that at the north-east corner of the square the valley broadens somewhat, and a maze of narrow streets starts from that corner. If when you descend from your eminence you penetrate and explore this corner you will find in it all that is left of the quaint Lisbon of before the great earthquake. For here, in a district still called the Mouraria, and in what once was the Villa Nova de Gibraltar adjoining it, dwelt outside the ancient walls the Moors and Jews, who for centuries almost monopolised the wealth of Portugal, until at the bidding of his Spanish father-in-law and mother-in-law, Ferdinand and Isabel, the “Fortunate” King Manuel made short work of the children of Israel. Here in the ghetto, of which the ancient gateway still stands, the streets are narrow and tortuous. Crumbling gables and quaint corner turrets overhang the pathway, and dark mysterious entries, lined with oriental azulejos, tell of the time when men lived in daily fear of rapine and violence.
Almost sheer over the district of the Mouraria towers the hill upon which the fortress of St. Jorge stands, and if you care to climb it you may see Lisbon, and beyond from the point opposite to that from which you have just descended. The cathedral stands upon a hill nearer the river, and may best be reached by following the tram-lines up the Rua da Conceição. The sturdy old church fronts a triangular space, from which picturesque glimpses of the roofs of the old town and river-bank may be caught. Two square Romanesque towers, which, like the rest of the cathedral, are now in course of restoration from the vandalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stand on each side of and connect with a large square porch before the west door. Cupolas and a railed parapet formerly surmounted these towers, but battlements in accordance with the original design are in future to replace them, and the lavish additions of carved wood capitals to the pillars and coats of stucco over ancient decorations are being cleared away, thanks largely to the encouragement of the present Queen of Portugal, who is interested in the work.
Here on this hill stood the mosque of the Moslem kings, and here, when in 1147 Affonso Henriques, the first King of Portugal, captured the city, the first Christian church was built by the conqueror, who nominated an English warrior-monk, Gilbert, to be the first bishop of the new See. Upon a stone within the porch of the west door, the carved legend tells how the Moors were vanquished by the Christian king, and the cross set up in this place, and the twelfth-century round-arched doorway with the grotesque capitals of its pillars demonstrate that this part of the edifice at least dates from the earliest years of the Portuguese monarchy.
The interior presents six round arches on clustered marble columns, now stripped of the stucco that disfigured them for centuries, though the Corinthian capitals which were added in the eighteenth century still remain. When Lord Strathmore saw the church in 1760, five years after the earthquake, he referred to these Corinthian capitals in a sketch he drew of the church: “I have left out,” he says, “the large Corinthian capitals and marble pedestals which have been added to the pillars within memory. The fire has burnt most of the capitals off, both of the ambulatory and the nave arches, and the other capitals have been so much impaired that you can only see remains of basket-work, foliage, and flowers.” The intention referred to by Lord Strathmore to restore the church to its original simplicity was so far from being carried out that new gilt wood acanthus leaf capitals were added to these fine old Romanesque pillars. At last, however, the church is really being judiciously treated, and is rapidly assuming the grave, devotional appearance of the early Christian temples raised after the victories of Affonso Henriques.
The roof is particularly striking in its solid majesty, the middle flute of each cluster of columns springing to the ceiling and supporting a round arch carried over the nave to the opposite column, something like the roof plan at Alcobaça. The transepts have majestic rose windows at each end, and the central lantern tower or cimborio stands on pillars of lofty clustered columns, forming round arches rising as high as the roof of the nave; all this being as early as the first foundation of the church. The chancel is very beautiful early Gothic, with pointed arches, and a gorgeous ceiling, and the little Gothic chapels round the ambulatory are many of them interesting. Tombs and sarcophagi of archbishops, most of ages long past, crumble in dark corners and dim, grated chapels, and two splendid royal tombs of Affonso IV. and his wife are on the left of the high altar. Here, to be seen only on great occasions, rest the bones of the patron saint, Vincent, opportunely discovered by the king, Affonso Henriques, in their hiding-place far away, where, guarded by ravens, they had been saved from the desecration of the unbelieving Moors. The ship that brought the holy relics from the southernmost point of Portugal, for reverent preservation, to Lisbon was always escorted by the faithful ravens, thenceforward sacred birds for the cathedral church of Lisbon, where some of them are kept to this day in memory of their piety.
Along the walls of the aisles run large pictorial tableaux of scenes in the life of St. Vincent and incidents in the miracles of the ravens, the ancient blue and white tiles of which the pictures are composed showing clear indications of the still lingering Moorish traditions in early Christian ceramics. It was Saturday afternoon as I mused in the old church, which was blocked and encumbered in many places by the materials of the restoring workmen; and, wandering past an open doorway in the end of the south aisle, I heard the hum of voices. It came from the ruined cloister, where a sad-looking young priest and a sister of charity were teaching classes of little children. It was a charming picture. The bright sun filtered through the half-ruined twin lancet lights of the ogival arches and fell in dappled patches of gold upon the ancient sarcophagi and dismantled altars that lined the humble arcade: a wild, neglected little garden, all abloom with untended masses of autumn flowers and trails of crimson creepers, and the droning hum of the children reciting in turn the sacred lesson they were conning. Peace and remoteness from the world seemed to reign in this quiet nook of the busy capital. Here was none of the sculptured glories such as dazzled the beholder at Belem or Batalha; only two plain pointed narrow arches in each bay of the arcade, with a round light above, bordered by a simple nailhead or rouleau moulding. Everything is ruinous and in course of restoration, but devout humility is the note struck throughout the cathedral, from the solemn, restrained Romanesque of the nave to the plain sepulchral little Gothic cloister, where, in the dim sea-green light filtering through leaves and crumbling arches young children learn the letter of their faith.
There is in these Portuguese churches no affectation of the gloomy splendour and mystery which is the characteristic of the Spanish cathedrals. At mass on Sundays the faithful gather, and on other days a certain number attend; but the constant coming and going of worshippers at all hours of the day, and the celebration of mass at one altar or another continuously from dawn to midday that in Spain is universal, find no counterpart in the Portuguese portion of the Peninsula. Here, and above all in the north, the priest is not constantly in evidence, as he is in Spain, and his garb is, as a rule, as unobtrusive as that of an English clergyman; for the shovel-hat and flowing cassock and cloak have in Portugal almost disappeared. However religious the Portuguese may be the apparatus and panoply of religion are not conspicuous, and when once mass is over in the Portuguese church, the place is usually deserted.
Although with justice, Lisbon is usually considered an extremely unæsthetic capital, and has not much to show worth seeing in pictorial art, there is one feature, in which, little known or noticed as it is by visitors, Lisbon can boast of unrivalled artistic possessions. I mean in that of ecclesiastical orfèvrerie. When the religious houses were suppressed, and the State appropriated church property, the priceless productions of the old goldsmiths, gifts of devout sovereigns and grandees for centuries to sacred shrines, were not plundered or frittered away in private hands, as happened in England and France, but carefully preserved by the State for public enjoyment. Truth to say, no one seems to enjoy these exquisite objects very much now, for of the many times I have spent hours in admiring the collections in the National Museum, and in that of São Roque, I have rarely seen any but an occasional stranger in either place.
The Museum of Fine Arts at Lisbon possesses, it is true, few objects of importance, apart from the goldsmith’s work and ecclesiastical embroidery, and the lack of a catalogue of the paintings—except for the collection given to the nation by Count de Carvalhido—stands in the way of their enjoyment. Most that is worth seeing here in pictorial art comes from the suppressed religious houses and churches, especially the early Flemish and German paintings, of which several are really fine. But the collection of ancient pictures is so lamentable in condition as a whole, and so badly lit, as to make the study of them difficult. Count de Carvalhido’s large collection, which is separately housed in two rooms in the Museum, contains a few good pictures and many by obscure artists quite the reverse, the specimens of the Flemish and Germanic schools predominating. The attribution of the works to named painters is often quite wide of the mark, many pictures bearing no resemblance whatever to the style of their alleged authors. There is, for instance, a little panel attributed to Sir Thomas Lawrence. It is called “Seduction,” and represents, in the usual eighteenth-century French genre style, an interior with a young man seated at an open escritoire offering jewels and money to a girl, whilst an old woman watches through a half-closed door. Anything more unlike Lawrence, either in technique or subject, it would be difficult to conceive. Another picture, a large canvas attributed to Zaniberti, an Italian painter, who died in 1636, represents a Carnival in Rome with a large number of maskers and spectators, all of whom are dressed in the fashion of the late eighteenth century, a hundred and fifty years after Zaniberti’s death.